Emerging Technologies, Innovation, and Academic Transformation
We all feel the need to innovate and transform our current practices to keep pace with a landscape that is rapidly evolving. While there is no shortage of innovations in teaching and learning, the process by which we discover them, select them for pilots, and consider them for full-scale implementation can be challenging. During the 2012 ELI Online Fall Focus Session, some of the questions we addressed included:
- How do we establish and cultivate an organizational culture that promotes innovation and transformative thinking?
- What processes are best to help us identify the innovations and opportunities that will make the most difference to student success?
- How can we construct pilots that will provide us with the information we need to decide if the innovations we’ve selected are going to address the issues we seek to solve?
- How do we know when, if, and how we should scale up our projects from the pilot stage to production and to what level?
The focus session sought to engage the teaching and learning community in addressing these questions and exploring the most successful models for working with instructional innovations. We toured institutional examples of higher education incubator models, various pilot structures and processes, rubrics and methodologies for evaluating pilots, and looked at considerations and tools to scale innovations to varying degrees.