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When times are tough, institutions are under more
competitive pressure than ever to do well for their
students. Unfortunately this is the precise time when cash
is in short supply, faculty workloads may have increased,
and development/support staff and budgets are often slashed.
For institutions that want to do a more effective job of
competing and meeting external demands for quality, it's
time for a more frugal approach to innovation.
One approach to frugal innovation: help faculty share
low-cost, low-risk, easy-to-explain improvements in teaching and learning
with each other. That's really two ideas, and they go
well together:
-
Faculty helping each other improve
their courses (with a slight assist from staff to help
them get together)
-
Low Threshold Activities and
Applications (LTAs) -- small steps toward improvement --
that each faculty member can grasp quite quickly and try
safely, easily, and inexpensively and that promise real
rewards if successful, e.g. better learning,
time-savings. (For on LTAs, click here.)
"Frugal": These kinds of improvements are a good
fit for peer-to-peer assistance because LTAs can be communicated
quickly and easily: e.g., in:
-
a casual conversation among faculty,
-
a 5-15 minute
workshop scheduled as an agenda item in a
departmental meeting and led by a faculty member,
-
a
page-long
description written by a faculty member and appearing on the web or in a newsletter,
-
an eClip
(brief video clip online that explains how to do
something or why it's worth doing), or
-
just
a few sentences
in an email or on a web page.
We know of no institution that is
(yet) world-class at helping its faculty find and share LTAs.
Accelerating the pact of informal learning by faculty is a
relatively new approach to faculty support and development.
We'd like to help some of our subscribing
institutions test this strategy for large-scale faculty
engagement by trying at least some of the following steps.
Our suggestions fall into three areas: how to encourage
faculty to consistently pay attention to this strategy for
improvement, where to find more LTAs, and how to share LTAs.
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Focusing
faculty attention on sharing of LTAs over a
period of years
-
Finding more LTAs
-
Strategies for sharing LTAs
Such initiatives could help answer many
questions. For example,
-
Is it better to find a few widely
useful, highly rewarding LTAs and then work hard to make
sure all potentially interested faculty eventually hear about those
few terrific ideas? or instead to help each interested faculty
member
connect with peers who teach similar courses so they can
each discover LTAs that may be quite specific to that
particular course? The first option involves a
relatively small number of LTAs that can be vividly
documented and persistently disseminated, while the
latter strategy involves (across a college) a very large
number of LTAs (shared by talking, simple email, or the
like), only a few of which are seen by any given faculty
member. The first strategy helps assure that the
idea is low threshold by doing a first rate job of
teaching about it. The second strategy lowers thresholds
by focusing on idea sharing among faculty in very
similar contexts.
-
The answer to that first question
helps settle a second question: should the typical medium of
communicating these LTAs be person-to-person
conversation? short emails? 15 minute workshops?
online tutorials.
Obviously it would be great if we could
support "all of the above." But few institutions
and individuals can afford
to try everything to share an LTA. By experimentation,
institutions should be able to invent adequate ways to increase the pace at which typical faculty
encounter attractive, rewarding, time-saving, easy-to-adapt
ideas for improving teaching and learning in their courses..
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Maryland 20912
Phone:
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To talk about our work
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contact: Sally Gilbert |
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