As sports coaching continues to professionalize, the demand for and importance placed upon high-quality education and development programs for sports coaches is increasing. As a result, the landscape of provision is changing, and there is now a recognition of the key role that higher education institutes play in the education, development, and assessment of sports coaches. In this insights article, the authors argue that as there is a scarcity of research focused solely on assessment as a feature of coach education programs, there is something to be gained from examining how higher education institutes assess sports coaches. This represents an important contribution to the research literature, given that assessment is a feature of nearly all coach education programs and that the attainment of a specific award communicates to stakeholders (e.g., employers, athletes, parents) that a precise standard of practice has been met. As such, the authors identify how some higher education institutes are addressing the issue of assessment with sports coaches and highlight a series of assessment principles, alongside practical examples from the literature, which are intended to stimulate conversation in what the authors argue is an important area of study.

In recent years, calls have grown for the use of digital technologies to transform coach education and enhance student learning; however, empirical research evidence for their efficacy is lacking. This paper describes our initial experiences of a Higher Education Funding Council for England funded project, designed to facilitate online peer mentoring and collaborative reflection between bachelor degree students at two separate UK universities. So far, the pedagogical approach has been differentially effective, with three categories describing our current perceptions of successful and/or unsuccessful student engagement in it. Namely, students require an adequate knowledge base, an appropriate technological and personal skillset, and the attitudinal dispositions to deploy them effectively.

Despite its obvious importance, we argue that assessment as a feature of coach education programmes has been overlooked in the peer-reviewed published literature. As a result, it is suggested that approaches to assessing sport coaches within coach education programmes can sometimes be ill considered and lead to suboptimal experiences for multiple stakeholders. To address this problem situation, we tentatively propose five interconnected principles of assessment in the first section of this article. These include the integration of teaching, learning, and assessment; assessment as a means of developing metacognitive skills; authentic/practice-based assessment; clearly and transparently foregrounding success criteria; and collaboration within assessment activities. By considering these principles, we suggest that there is much to be gained by the coach education community. In the second section, we showcase how these principles have been adopted within a football coach education programme in Flanders (Belgium). With this example, we explain why assessment became a central concern of the organisation and how they developed an effective assessment approach. Finally, we invite considered discussion and comments on our paper, with a view to starting a conversation in an area that is scarcely spoken about.

As large-scale coach education programs receive a growing amount of attention and investment (e.g., human and financial resources), the case for increased understanding of their impact is a pressing matter. In this paper, the authors outlined the creation of the Flemish Interactive Coaching Monitoring System (FICOMS) within the Flemish School for Coach Education (Belgium). The FICOMS is a data warehouse consisting of multiple databases, which was set up in 2019 to integrate data on coach education and coach certifications (1960–present), active coaches within club-organized sports (2014–present) and sport clubs, sports participants, and sports infrastructure. The FICOMS provides a variety of interactive and externally facing dashboards with useful statistics on coach education and coaching in Flanders. For example, the evolution of dropout ratios of qualified versus nonqualified coaches in sports clubs and sports federations can be identified, as well as the evolution of the percentage of qualified coaches in a specific sport, sports federation, or gender, or regional differences. By describing the main characteristics of FICOMS and sharing some emerging insights and early possibilities, the authors aimed to clarify the potential of this information technology for different stakeholders, such as governments, policymakers, sports federations, Olympic committees, education partners, municipalities, and researchers.

In recent years, calls have grown for the implementation of heutagogy, a form of self-determined learning, in higher education settings. Although a key tenet of the heutagogic paradigm is a belief in the notion of human agency, our recent experiences as university tutors suggest that many students might not actually desire some of the aspects inherent in the approach, instead preferring more didactic, tutor-led modes of teaching and learning geared towards successful completion of assessed work. This paper reports the extent to which undergraduate students (N=35) at two different UK institutions, about to embark jointly on a module designed using a heutagogical approach, valued learner autonomy and self-determination in their studies. It also identified students’ major motivators when undertaking the module. Results suggest learner autonomy and self-determination were indeed valued by students, with four themes describing their main motivators: (a) achievement, (b) knowledge and understanding, (c), self-improvement, and (d) peer learning and interaction.