Despite the growing number of teaching-focused academics worldwide, a fair and consistent approach to their promotion is lacking. Research, a focus of more traditional roles, is still prioritised in many universities. Even promotion requirements written specifically for teaching-focused academics may confusingly hint at research, in particular educational/pedagogic research. As a result, teaching-focused academics may feel tempted to go into educational/pedagogic research. This poses a number of challenges at all career stages. The aim of this RIPPA is to study the specific promotion requirements of teaching-focused academics in Computer Science, the challenges that they face when going into Computer Science Education research, and the support offered by their institutions, before providing recommendations.
A number of factors, including sector expansion and competition, increasing student numbers and audit requirements, and development of managerial policies, have led universities worldwide to hire increasing numbers of teaching-focused academics 7, 12, 13 . Also known as education-focused, teaching-track, teaching intensive or teaching only, their role includes primarily or solely teaching 2, 12 . This distinguishes them from traditional academic profiles.
The above, together with an interest in education/pedagogy, lead some teaching-focused academics to going into educational/pedagogic research. However, such a decision can pose challenges, like retraining from other domains of study 3 and fitting research within an already high workload 7, 15 , coupled with little funding for such research from universities 15 and its under-appreciation 8, 15 .
To the authors' knowledge, none of the above topics have been explored in the specific context of teaching-focused academics in Computer Science (CS) going into Computer Science Education (CSEd) research. Panels in the ACM Technical Symposium on CSEd have discussed various topics related to CS teaching-focused academics, including promotion 1 , but their conclusions were not (and are not usually) published. Some challenges in conducting research have been highlighted for UK early-career CS academics 4 , and a small study with teaching and research-focused academics in the United States identified obstacles to conducting CSEd research, notably related to promotion due to institution unfamiliarity with CSEd and inconsistent publication type expectations 11 . However, none of these focused on the particular needs of teaching-focused academics and their promotion. CSEd itself is a relatively young field, e.g., the SIGCSE Technical Symposium has only existed for 50 years 6, 9 . The authors are consulted on promotion cases for CS teaching-focused academics in their departments, and some have experienced a slow start in launching CSEd research groups due to the challenges perceived by teaching-focused academics. Moreover, our previous work 10 has discussed general difficulties in publishing in CSEd, and it would be interesting to study how these resonate with teaching-focused academics.
The first goal of this RIPPA is to study the variety of promotion requirements for teaching-focused CS roles, and whether/how educational/pedagogic research is considered in them. Comparison of promotion requirements with requirements from teaching and learning (T&L) professional bodies (e.g., Advance HE in the UK) will help gauge whether promotion meets national teaching quality expectations. A second goal is to explore the barriers that CS teaching-focused academics face when going from a different CS domain into CSEd research, and compare them with our findings from previous work 10 . Finally, this RIPPA will review CS institution support for both promotion and going into CSEd research. The ultimate aim is to provide recommendations to CS institutions and CS teaching-focused academics towards providing/seeking fairer promotion and improved research support.
The methodology we propose to use is as follows:
Participants will be involved in the following activities: