Deakin University wanted to redesign its courses to be “intellectually challenging and engaging on-line and on-campus” with 70 staff in six teams charged with delivering.
The task for academic developers was to “lead from the margins,” without line authority. Siva Krishnan and Harsh Suri explain how they got things done.
They were appointed to lead two of the Faculty teams a year in, and found the project behind schedule. Course directors thought the process was intrusive and unnecessary, the developers felt unloved and burdened by constant changes in expectations. Sceptics judged the exercise as about “edutainment … producing audio-visual resources that characterised high technical quality.”
Krishnan and Suri responded with five strategies to empower course teams:
- Leadership and ownership: they abandoned the practise of external agencies (such as the library and academic skills support) assessing course data, with a view to “fixing them,” which did not go well with teachers. Instead, academic teams identified issues to address
- Course-level thinking: encouraging academics to focus on all of course content, rather than their own units, connecting thinking to relevant regulation and accreditation
- Learner-centred cost-benefit: they switched the measure of digital content from products created to student use across courses, including self-paced resources to cover gaps in assumed knowledge and skills
- Implementing learner-centred enhancements: teaching and learning unit workshops to build technical competence among academics, for course teams to reflect on their own philosophies and practise, “achieving tangible enhancements that genuinely addressed an existing learning problem, even if these enhancements were difficult to implement.”
- Building and leading teaching and support teams: they changed faculty support team success metrics from content produced to support for teachers
The take-outs
- Ensure all involved understand what academic developers do. They should focus on supporting teachers continually improving practise and innovation.
- Academic developers and course teams should engage “in a productive struggle” to “create agency, ownership and capability for experimenting with new pedagogical and technological solutions.”
- “Rather than promoting a conception of ‘T&L innovation’ as implementing the latest and the greatest fad, we reconceptualised it in terms of designing effective practices for the specific context sustainably with careful attention to various pragmatic constraints.”
