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INNOVATION IN UNIVERSITY TEACHING: POLICY AND PRACTICE
BERA Annual Conference 2005:
University of Glamorgan, Treforest, Pontypridd
Josh Jacobs Suzanne Greenwald
Director of Education Educational Advisor
Cambridge-MIT Institute Cambridge-MIT Institute
MIT MIT
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005
Background:
The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) is a company created in 2000 with a $100M grant from the Chancellor of the Exchequer as a joint venture of Cambridge University and MIT. The goals of CMI are national: to enhance the innovation, competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurial bent of the UK economy. In education, the focus is on current educational practices and how they prepare students for a career on either side of the University-Industry relationship. The goal is to create programs that give learners the knowledge, skills and attitudes which will enhance their capacity to engage in innovation and knowledge exchange. The nature of the Cambridge-MIT collaboration led to a portfolio of projects centred in engineering and the sciences, which has put us in position to address some of the issues raised by Roberts (2005) and other commentators on strategic subjects as a primary site for academic-industrial exchange.
The undergraduate exchange developed between Cambridge and MIT has been the source of much insight and inspiration for further development of educational research programmes. We have supported joint efforts by teaching staff at Cambridge, MIT and other UK universities in six broad educational areas:
1. Graduate education, leading to the creation of MPhil degree programmes at Cambridge;
2. Interdisciplinary curriculum development programmes, in such areas as Biological Engineering;
3. Programmes in support of undergraduate research across all disciplines;
4. Experiments in blended pedagogy, seeking to create new, effective combinations of the very different teaching practices of Cambridge and MIT;
5. Programmes aimed at making skills such as teamwork more integral to undergraduate curricula; and
6. Programmes in undergraduate and mid-career entrepreneurship education.
In each of these areas, CMI has sought to create and support innovations in education that would likely not be supported by existing funding sources such as HEFCE, regional development agencies, or Research Councils. By integrating a strong, programme-wide attention to design and evaluation in each of our projects, we have attempted to build upon the unique collaborative test-bed of CMI-fostered student interactions, in order to identify and act upon their lessons.
One lesson that emerged from the first few years of the CMI education programme was that the extreme dedication to educational innovation brought to bear by our project leaders was not fully supported by their institutional or national structure of incentives. Because of the nature of the CMI education portfolio and team – both of which seek to exploit a “para-academic” capacity to bring out and develop the good ideas that teaching staff often cannot get off the ground themselves – we felt compelled to explore the overall perceptions by teaching staff of innovation in UK higher education. We hoped to identify common themes with reference to the organisational aspects of the HE sector that stood out as facilitators or barriers to innovation in teaching/learning. The ultimate goal would be for CMI to work with partners at individual HEIs, at other existing educational networks (such as the Higher Education Academy and its Subject Centres), or in Government to highlight these structural issues, leading to longer-term efforts within Universities to connect members of staff seeking to innovate with the resources that will allow their insights to be taken up broadly within the sector.
Introduction to the Study:
Methodology:
Live and phone interviews were conducted from September of 2004 to the present with faculty members throughout the UK. These interviews were aimed at gathering perspectives on innovation within higher education systems. Innovation was broadly defined, intending to yield multiple interpretations based on experience. As a result, respondents made a range of references from innovation in classroom teaching methods, to research applications to informal, on-line learning environments. Interestingly, “education innovations” were often associated with delivery methods – chiefly educational technology – rather than the substance, value or purpose of teaching or learning. Some of the richer, definitional offerings included the following examples:
“Innovation is that artefact that moves us forward in some way.”
“Innovation can be about application as well as blue horizons.”
The semi-structured questionnaire contained seven items (see Appendix i for interview instrument), aimed at investigating a deeper understanding of innovation across several individual and institutional dimensions: personal philosophies towards innovation; implementation and diffusion; the locus of innovation; motivations for innovation; implementation and diffusion of innovation; cases of successful and failed innovations; support systems and obstacles to motivation; and finally, the measurement of the impact of innovation.
The Sample:
In the pilot stage of the study, a first tier of sampling used a selection criteria aimed at including a geographically, and academically diverse sample of institutions. As a result, a range of seniority levels both within Russell and non-Russell Group universities was represented (n=20).
In the second tier of sampling, formative findings suggested the department played a key role as a unit of analysis. For this reason, the sampling then focused on faculty within two main departments—Engineering (n=14) and Physics (n=10).
Literature Review:
The literature reflects the diverse ways (discussed above) in which teaching staff identify and locate the salient aspects of innovation affecting them. Authors dwelling on the diffusion of innovations per se ground themselves in the work of Rogers (1995) and his commentators, who attest to the fact that an objectively recognised advance may nonetheless not be taken up if not presented and supported according to local expectations and contexts. While not addressing innovation as his central topic, Ramsden (1998, 2003) provides an important reference point for many discussions of efforts to manage the teaching and learning aspect of higher education institutions, addressing the incorporation of organisational strategies from a corporate context into academia.
Within the UK higher education context, Silver (1999) provides a cogent outline of the ways in which innovation has been understood and attempted since the 1960s (leading up to and including the era of corporate-influenced managerial strategies). He defines a progress from innovation based solely in the efforts of an “individual enthusiast” (p. 150) to a more state-driven and bureaucratised “directed innovation” (p. 152), which manifests in activities focussed along three prominent axes: educational technology (the medium), on a discipline (horizontal affiliation) and/or within an institution (vertical affiliation).
The conflation of innovation in educational technologies with innovation in teaching and learning generally (see also Bates (2000) resonated with many respondents’ comments, particularly as UK funding streams came increasingly to focus on technology over the past three decades. The organisational question of whether innovation is fostered in disciplinary or institutional contexts is more complicated. Since the call by Boyer (1990) for a scholarship of teaching and learning, the disciplinary orientation of most teaching staff as their primary “cultural” affiliation (see Bergquist 1992, Becher 1989 for broad descriptions of academic cultures) has been supported by research into effective teaching and learning practice. The correlation of disciplinary content mastery with innovation in pedagogy and/or curriculum (see Clegg, 2003), Healey (2000), e.g. creates the potential for conflict with the increasing centralisation of management and of resources within universities and national HE systems, especially as centralised resources are more and more in support of research. Drawing again on the literature around corporate organisations, some authors identify universities as “greedy” institutions, whose increasing demands on the time of teaching staff – particularly in quality assurance exercises – have led to alienation amongst staff, often to the greater disadvantage of women and ethnic minorities (Currie et al, 2000).
While illustrating these potentially negative forces, Knight (2002) provides practical advice to UK teaching staff on engaging positively with teaching as a central aspect of one’s academic career, suggesting that staff be “alert to ways of domesticating change” (p. 192) rather than seeking too eagerly to conform to each change agenda that arises within one’s institution. He argues for the value of normative or re-educational change as opposed to change programmes that are mandated (p. 187). In this he joins Elton (2003) and Robertson (1997) in arguing for novel models of leadership suited to the particular challenge of fostering innovation in a climate of diminishing resources and incentives that do not explicitly favour teaching.
This leadership gap was the chief finding of the one existing study we identified in this area, conducted by Hannan et al (1999) in 1997-98. Hannan and colleagues interviewed 221 pre-identified innovators across 13 subjects in 15 UK universities, focusing on attempts to introduce new teaching and learning practices rather than educational technology or new curricula. The one survey question whose results were analysed, “Why innovate?,” led to a typology of circumstances leading to innovation – chiefly personal motivation towards further development, or demand by external circumstances. The authors concluded that the primary challenge facing their respondents was in moving innovation from the small group of individual innovators (described by Bates as “lone rangers”) towards the broader community of staff who are not inclined to struggle to join in teaching innovations.
Overall Findings:
From the pilot survey, we identified a potential typology of innovators within UK Higher Education. The most salient figure in this typology is the enthusiastic innovator, or “Lone Ranger”: such members of faculties were recognized by most respondents as the sources of innovation. However, the embedding and diffusion of these innovations were seen as contained, by virtue of the innovators’ lack of institutional support and of grounding in methods of educational research and experiment. Some respondents sharing this view of small pockets of innovation led by enthusiasts took a laissez-faire approach, seeing it as up to these individuals to make of their innovations what they could; a few others saw the need to apply additional resources and leadership influence to foster a supportive environment for such innovation in teaching.
Most respondents described competition as an forceful external factor inhibiting educational innovation. The competitive Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that determines funding levels was described by all who mentioned it as a force inhibiting innovation, by forcing individual staff, Departments and Schools to prioritize research over all other pursuits.
Following on the theme of external pressure inhibiting innovation, in response to the RAE and other factors that lead some faculty to prioritize research over teaching and learning within their disciplines, some respondents suggested the need for new management structures. This might include a senior role dedicated to fostering educational innovation or “change management” more broadly.
All respondents described educational assessment efforts, such as benchmarking, to be extremely challenging due to lack of expertise, reinforcement, or resources. However, those respondents who described themselves as more involved in educational innovation noted that rigorous evaluation was the key to effecting real change. As one respondent noted, “We tend to distrust new things and require they be proved efficacious, whilst allowing the status quo to continue without need of proof of efficacy. Students successfully getting through the system is the ‘proof’ that the status quo works, supposedly, but it is not proof in the scientific sense nor social sense.”
Physics Findings:
“There’s been a blizzard in the Treasury over the last five years to support innovation.”
--Sir Peter Knight, Head of Department of Physics, Imperial College
Outside of the university, UK physics staff comment on the influence of the central funding research council for physics (EPSRC), increasingly concerned with innovation and research strategies which help the wider world.
Inside the university, physics teaching staff members suggest a key role for the culture of the university. Within some universities, members of the physics department perceive the costs of innovation as relatively high, and otherwise discouraged through existing reward and promotion systems. These, in a sense, were “low performing” departments on the innovation spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum, “high performing” departments seemed to embed and therefore encourage local innovation through various incentive systems such as student competitions, and flexible faculty tenure criteria (e.g. applications of research as well as publications, allowances for time for professional consultancies).
Overall, most physics teaching staff respondents expressed concern over a growing crisis in the recruitment and maintenance of students choosing physics as their undergraduate concentration. Declining enrolments and altogether disappearing departments of physics point to the seriousness of this crisis. Innovation then, in the context of crisis, was perceived as a critical intervention as a means of survival by revitalizing students’ interest in the subject. Methods considered as “innovative” in this category included those which were more exploratory, hands-on, student-centred and overall, more appealing to students. In contrast, those methods generally looked down upon included modularization, self-learning and e-learning because of their arbitrary structures.
In these “high performing” departments, the physics teaching staff members seemed overall very well-versed about the knowledge application game. In these rare occasions, innovations in teaching and learning were reported as positive byproducts from laboratory research to student research, curricular enhancements or classroom practices. Ultimately, students themselves benefited from these environments.
Furthermore, “tech transfer” seemed to be the modern-day lingua franca (e.g. licenses, spin-outs) within the culture of these high performing departments encouraging of innovation. Members of staff from these departments seemed to be in the practice of asking questions such as, “Where is the eventual market down the line?”, “Who will be the end user and why?,” “What is the scientific impact?”
Along those same lines, in addition to knowledge application and language of innovation, members of staff from “high performing” physics departments expressed a familiarity with interactions between the research world and the spin-out company world. It was suggested that this process works best when staff are permitted to work half inside, and half outside the university. A good example of this is Imperial College’s arrangement where staff is permitted to work one day a week as consultants.