In 2000 the UK Government published a paper on Higher Education (HE) outlining, amongst other things, its desire that all new staff should receive proper training in lecturing/teaching at the induction stage of their careers and existing lecturing/teaching staff should undertake Continuing Professional Development (CPD). The general expectation was that in most universities the CPD material would be generic (non-subject-specific) and would be delievered by educational or staff development groups. As a similar time a Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) comprising 24 Subject Centres was established for HE to promote good practice, and its dissemination, in teaching and learning. One of these Centres was in Mathematics, Statistics and OR (MSOR), with responsibility for Statstics and OR resting jointly with the Univeristy of Nottingham Trent University. Also at the same time the Institute for Learning and Teaching in HE (ILTHE) was set up to establish a UK professional body of teachers in HE.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education