Today marks an important milestone at Austin Community College. The Teaching & Learning Excellence Division, the umbrella division that has connected the Offices of Academic Technology, Faculty Development & Evaluation, Experiential Learning, and Library Services for the past decade, no longer exists.
I want to be honest about what that sentence means and what it doesn’t.
What’s Actually Changing
The division, as a formal organizational structure, is gone. The four offices that lived under it are now organized under different areas within Academic Affairs. If you’re used to thinking of Teaching & Learning Excellence as a single entity with a shared org chart, that structure is no longer there.
That’s a real change, and it’s worth naming plainly instead of glossing over it.
What Isn’t Changing
Here’s what hasn’t changed: the work. Academic Technology still supports the ACC community in bringing technology into instruction thoughtfully and effectively. Faculty Development & Evaluation still invests in the people who teach our students. Experiential Learning still prepares students to step into the Austin workforce with real skills, not just credentials. Library Services still supports faculty and students with the curricular and non-curricular materials that make learning possible.
None of that programming pauses. None of it gets smaller. The people doing this work are the same people who showed up yesterday, and they’ll show up tomorrow with the same commitment to the faculty and students they serve.
Ten Years of a Good Idea
The Teaching & Learning Excellence Division existed for ten years as an attempt to bring these instructional support services under one roof, and I think it’s worth pausing to acknowledge what that decade built. Bringing Academic Technology, Faculty Development, Experiential Learning, and Library Services together wasn’t just an org chart exercise. It reflected a real belief that these functions are connected, that a faculty member’s experience with technology, training, applied learning opportunities, and course materials shouldn’t feel like four disconnected departments.
Ten years is long enough to build habits, relationships, and shared language across those offices. That doesn’t disappear just because the umbrella structure does. If anything, a decade of working this closely together means these offices carry that connective tissue with them into their new homes within Academic Affairs.
The Throughline
Organizational structures shift. Divisions get created, reorganized, and sometimes dissolved. That’s normal in any institution, and higher education is no exception. What matters more than the box on the org chart is whether the mission holds steady through the change.
So while the Teaching & Learning Excellence Division no longer exists as a division, our collective focus is clear: modeling teaching and learning excellence for our faculty, staff, and students. That was true under the old structure, and it’s just as true now that these offices sit in different places within Academic Affairs.
If you’re navigating a similar organizational shift at your own institution, whether it’s a reorganization, a division being dissolved, or services being redistributed across departments, I’d be glad to talk through how to protect the mission and the faculty experience through that kind of transition. Contact me for a consultation.