‘As long as you use the template’: fostering creativity in a pedagogic model

Abstract

As the higher education landscape enters a new era of digital-first education, education designers are tasked with supporting the pedagogic work of educators to design learning experiences which connect students with disciplinary content, with each other and with their educator in the digital learning environment. This paper uses a collaborative autoethnographic approach to reflect upon the challenges experienced by two education designers implementing a pedagogic model to support blended and hybrid learning at scale. A key tension of this work is the perception that design templates diminish educators’ academic freedom and creativity by exerting institutional control over disciplinary experts. We argue that bringing teaching teams together in dialogic and disciplinary learning communities around our pedagogic model fosters creativity by providing space for educators to scaffold their own development, and ultimately, reconceptualise their content for new ways of teaching and learning.