Dr. Greg Foley:

I have mixed feelings about this matter as well. One of the key things I would do if I was proposing that everybody should have a postgraduate in education or whatever, is that I would look elsewhere, see what the evidence is and assess whether it makes people better teachers. Logically, one would think that it would but does it really? This goes back to my point that education should be evidence-based as much as possible if one is going to impose a certain workload. Let us remember that when a new academic is appointed, and this is particularly the case in STEM disciplines, he or she must work night and day to set up labs and recruit postgraduates to carry out research in order to get papers out as quickly as possible. That is an extra load on a new academic. A lot of teaching is discipline specific. How I go about teaching engineering is very different from how someone else would go about teaching his or her subject.