One of the questions I am regularly asked is ‘how are you able to publish so much?’. One strategy I’ve found really helpful is the ‘Buy One Get One Free’ (BOGOF) approach to scholarship advocated by [the awesome] Professor Julie Hulme at Nottingham Trent University.

Julie’s central idea is “Start with what you’re doing already, and get the maximum value out of it!“. Ie if you are already doing a great piece of work associated with teaching and learning, think about ways that you can get multiple outputs for the same piece of work. This is an efficient way of working, as you will already be in the intellectual headspace for a given activity, so you may as well capitalise on that work and use it for more than one thing. For example, if you have evaluated a piece of teaching for your own purposes, can you also present it at a conference or write a blog about it? Can you publish your resources on a platform like the National Teaching Repository so others can use it, and you can track downloads and even citations?

Here are a few examples of how I have used BOGOF in my own work.

Example 1: Getting the most out of a new practical

During the pandemic, I designed some at home practical kits that we posted to students allowing them to do some hands-on experiments. This required a moderate amount of resource development, including instructions and video tutorials.

I immediately put the resources online so students could access them easily. I published the videos on my YouTube channel, and the instructions on a scientific methods platform (protocols.io). After the practicals I also wrote a blog post on this site to explain the protocols to a wider audience.

A colleague of mine suggested doing a short evaluation questionnaire for the kits, which I was thankful to get rapid ethical approval for (make friends with your ethics committee so they can help in these sorts of situations). I also discovered that the physics department had also used an at-home kit model, so got their buy-in for using the same survey with their students. As a result we were able to publish a study in International Journal of Science Education looking at the impact of the at-home kit pedagogy on development of student skills and independence.

Another colleague suggested that it would be good to explore the student experience of using the kits more. I therefore obtained a second rapid ethics approval (really make friends with your ethics committee!), and recruited undergraduate coauthors for a paper in the Journal of Biological Education describing the experiments and their experiences of the at home kits.

The kits could have been a ‘throw away’ practical that took up time for no longer term impact. However, using the BOGOF mentality I have 14,000 YouTube hits, over 400 downloads of the resources and two papers to show for it. The papers took additional effort, but not as much as designing a new study from scratch would have been.

Publications:

Hubbard, K., Birycka, M., Britton, M. E., Coates, J., Coxon, I. D., Jackson, C. H., … Worsley, B. (2022). The ‘Tea Test’ – a mobile phone based spectrophotometer protocol to introduce biochemical methods independent of the laboratory. Journal of Biological Education, 58(2), 483–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2022.2072934

Hubbard, K., Henri, D., Scott, G., Snelling, H., & Roediger, E. (2025). Developing undergraduate practical skills and independence with ‘at home practical kits.’ International Journal of Science Education, 47(1), 65–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2024.2311087

Example 2: Writing a paper based on a workshop event

For a few years I have been one of the co-organisers of the Bioscience Educators Network, a community of practice to support education focussed academics in UK bioscience. I have run a workshop for this network on ‘Evidencing excellence in teaching’ several times, that centres on a framework for collecting evidence.

I had written up this workshop and framework as a blog post on this site, but another co-organiser suggested writing it up more formally. We settled on The Biochemist as a magazine style outlet that allowed a ‘lighter touch’ than an educational journal would, but that was still citable with a DOI. The article become one of their ‘Beginners Guide’ features, and at the time of writing has ~5000 views and over 500 downloads. At one point it was the top trending articles across Biochemical Society journals. Again, nice additional external impact for ideas that already existed.

Publications:

David Smith, Katharine Hubbard (2023). A beginner’s guide to evidencing your teaching practice. The Biochemist; 45 (2): 6–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1042/bio_2023_110

Example 3: Highlight your latest paper on high profile sector blogs

The previous two examples started with a non-written format which became publications. The reverse is also possible, I.e. if you do publish a paper, make sure you disseminate it widely to maximise impact.

In 2024 I published an article in Higher Education about the limitations of ‘gap’ style metrics for measuring educational inequity. I’m really proud of this article, but it is quite theoretical and technical, and is published in a formal academic journal which I acknowledge isn’t going to be particularly widely read. To draw attention to the article, I have presented it in multiple conference talks and workshops, as you might expect. However, I have also written a piece for WonkHE which summarises the key points of the article, written in a style that is more likely to have a wide readership. Again – the work already exists, but writing about it for a respected blog maximises its reach and impact. There are multiple potential outlets for this high quality blog style writing including WonkHE, Times Higher Education, AdvanceHE, Association of National Teaching Fellows, and many others.

Publications:

Hubbard, K.E. We need better awarding gap metrics to genuinely address inequity. WonkHE (2024).

Hubbard, K.E. Institution level awarding gap metrics for identifying educational inequity: useful tools or reductive distractions?. Higher Education 88, 2269–2289 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01216-y

Example 4: From Curriculum Design to Review Article

Curriculum design and validation is one of the most time consuming but exciting and creative things we do as educators. Designing a high quality curriculum requires significant intellectual effort, which is often not recognised.

After being involved in a recent curriculum revamp, I identified an opportunity for writing an opinion article. We had adopted a bold competency based approach to curriculum design, which I found to be a powerful way of thinking about education that could have value to others. I didn’t want to do a formal study into competency based design, but I wanted to highlight it to others in my discipline. I therefore identified a disciplinary journal that accepted opinion based articles, and wrote up the competency based design but applying it to the specific area of focus for that journal. This was probably my easiest BOGOF win – I wrote the article in less than a week as the ideas were all in my head, and the opinion format meant that little additional work was required. Win win.

Publication:

Hubbard, K.E. Plant biology education: A competency-based vision for the future. Plants People Planet 6(4): 780-90 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10503

Conclusion

Hopefully through these examples you can see some strategies for maximising outputs and scholarly reputation. It should be noted that not all of these represent formal scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). I have previously written about the need for clarity about institutional requirements for SoTL. SoTL requires work to be both public and systematic, and to focus on positive improvements in teaching and learning. Blog style writing isn’t formal SoTL, but can still be valuable in raising your profile and demonstrating external standing.

We are all pressed for time, and academics with heavy teaching and student support loads often find it particularly difficult to carve out time for writing and dissemination of work. However, promotion panels are usually looking for public facing evidence of educational impact and scholarship. Hopefully my illustration of how I have used BOGOF in my own work is useful. This blog post is a BOGOF in its own right, being a summary of a workshop I gave at a recent conference. Getting recognition for education focussed work can be challenging to find time for, but hopefully you can see how useful BOGOF can be in practice.

Massive thanks to the fabulous Julie Hulme for this really helpful and practical approach which has been transformative for me! Check out her blog site which is packed with really useful information and wisdom.