Abstract
Learning and personal and professional growth are at the core of what universities do, whether for students, academics, or other internal and external stakeholders. Redesigned academic career frameworks support this, either through distinct pathway tracks or through recognition of the need to flexibly combine and reward a broad enough range of academic activities. Redesigned frameworks may be experienced differently by academic staff on offshore campuses in the context of transnational education. Factors which have a bearing, positively or less so, on offshore experiences are discussed in this chapter. As is the case with other change initiatives in universities, the introduction of redesigned frameworks will benefit from ongoing evaluation, both to allow adjustments that enable the implementation to run (more) smoothly and to support longer-term, strategic planning. The chapter offers a range of evaluation questions (and their underpinning assumptions) to help institutions ensure that their academic career frameworks are fit for purpose. It revisits the five scenarios, introduced in Chap. 3, of academics at different stages in their careers, to illustrate the impact of the frameworks on individuals and on their immediate and extended stakeholder communities. A note about the future offers provisional closure to the discussion about academic career frameworks.
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Sterling, M., Blaj-Ward, L., Simpson, R., Crawford, K. (2023). Provisional Wrap-Up and an Invitation to Continue the Academic Pathways Conversation. In: Redeveloping Academic Career Frameworks for Twenty-First Century Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41126-7_7
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