Managing Change in Conservative Institutions: Implementing and Sustaining Innovative Educational Design in University Level Courses

Abstract

The observations in this paper build on pedagogical design work such as Kolb's experience/reflection cycle, problem based and learning to suggest ways of both redesigning courses and improving the likelihood of their being adopted and maintained. Learning by Design is an integrative, comprehensive, coherent yet flexible approach that draws on student's prior knowledge, adds new ideas (theory) and helps them gain competence through understanding and practice. Learning by Design guides the teacher in the composition of activities and assessments that integrate multiple strategies. A key advantage is that it allows individual pathways and the dynamic reconfiguration of courses by both student and professor. However experience shows that merely explaining Learning by Design's capacity to significantly improve outcomes is enough to ensure its adoption. Suggestions are made that aim to overcome the barriers to implementing and sustaining educational innovation. The most common barriers are, the perception that it is extra work, it is not rigorous, it is the way professors were themselves taught or have successfully taught it in the past. The biggest barrier is the idea that there is a body of knowledge (content) that students must know and reproduce and that knowledge is provided by the lecturer either orally or in writing (in some form). Overcoming these barriers is essentially by demonstration, drawing on the same principles as those proposed for course design. Preventing rollback is the second challenge. The prime reason why rollback occurs is changes to the teaching teams. New people have their own ways so Learning by Design has to be re-implemented. The risk is reduced if the existing package can be handed over ready to run and be accommodative of different perspectives or agendas.