Innovation in Teaching and the Adoption of Instructional Technology

Over the past little while I have been trying to catch up on the work and correspondence that has piled up while I was attending the Teaching, Learning and Technology Conference at the University of Ottawa. I was impressed with the major themes of the conference which included;

•Can we identify key elements in the process of creation and innovation in teaching and learning?
•What are the levers, barriers, challenges, assets, and key success factors to innovation?
•Is technology a key enabler of innovation?
•Is faculty development a key enabler of innovation?

The people at Ottawa's Centre for University Teaching are committed to advancing initiatives which promote scholarship in teaching. I believe that these endeavours are necessary in truly brining a more balanced focus to research and teaching responsibilities in our universities. As it currently stands most universities place a strong emphasis on the research pedigree of faculty for the purposes of promotion and tenure and to a much lesser degree on teaching. I recognize the value that research brings to an institution (i.e. funding, enhanced reputation). However, if we are ever truly going to realize the main stream adoption of innovative instruction in a university setting, then faculty have to be formally recognized for their efforts. As a faculty member, naturally you would ask yourself aside from the intrinsic motivation of wanting to engage learners why would I invest all the time and energy into developing creative methods for teaching, when ultimately what is going to lead to promotion is research?

Many of the people that attended and organized the conference are working hard to change this and I fully applaud them in their efforts. Some examples of initiatives they are currently involved in;

Facultydevelopment.ca is a project started by a group of 3M teaching scholars that have built a website to share exemplary practices for instruction with other faculty members throughout Canada. “By providing flexible access to interactive learning materials and a collaborative virtual environment, it addresses barriers that faculty face in their pursuit of lifelong learning - access and time.”

Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE), “is a national association of academics interested in the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education.”

International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED), “was established to promote educational or academic development in higher education world-wide.”

One of the keynote speakers, Dr. Gary Poole, director of the Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth at UBC and a driving force behind the initiatives I mentioned above, chose to address the topic of Motivation for Innovation in Teaching: Where are the Well Springs? Specifically he examined the conditions which facilitate the adoption of innovative practices, citing examples of how students have often generated or been the source of creative approaches. He went on to suggest that sometimes it is beneficial to learn about a new technology first and then figure out how to incorporate that into instruction. Dr. Poole conceded that sometimes this leads to failure, but that much can be learned from the experience. While I agree that failure produces valuable lessons, this approach to the mainstream adoption of instructional technology has led to some significant challenges at the University of Toronto.

If one honestly assesses the current state of online teaching at many universities including UofT, the analysis would lead you to conclude that there is a great deal of web-based education and instructional technology being utilized, but that this has failed to yield widespread creative approaches to teaching. There are indeed instructors who find new and meaningful ways to employ technology to facilitate enhanced levels of learning. However, the large majority of instructors tend to map their traditional practices onto the new medium without a corresponding examination of how technology could change existing instructional approaches. The adoption of technology does not necessarily lead to innovation. In fact, this approach to adopting technology actually creates a barrier to innovation in teaching.

In the majority of my instructional design consultations with faculty I spend far more time explaining to them how a tool works rather than looking at how technology can be used to improve instruction. They become fixated on administrative features of courseware tools, and developing skills they will need to relearn when new versions of the software are released. This is not a criticism of faculty. It reflects a reality of not having the proper administrative supports in place. Instead of faculty being freed up to develop teaching skills, their time is consumed by learning the bells and whistles.

True innovation in teaching does not result from adopting technology, rather it comes from re-examining current practice to discover opportunities for how instruction can be changed in order to address the needs of the learner. During this process faculty can be supported in trying to determine how technology can be used to enable new outcomes.

For example, in the Teaching Online Workshop we deliver, faculty begin by identifying an instructional challenge they are currently faced with in their class. They combine previously learned cognitive strategies and principles of teaching, along with newly acquired procedures for designing instruction to plan an instructional activity that uses technology to address this challenge.

In my opinion, it is this type of framework that is likely to produce truly innovative approaches to teaching. Our reason for developing the pharmacology learning object was because we felt that the text book did not adequately represent or visualize the relationships which exist between therapeutic principles and the parameters relating to the physical and pharmacological properties of drugs. The Flash learning object allows the students to manipulate the variables, and to see the corresponding results in a blood concentration time curve. This enables the students to develop a better understanding of these concepts as they are able to formulate and test hypothesis related to drug administration.

Admittedly, I have yet to delve into the book by Poole and Bates (2003) "Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education", on current research and best practices on how to integrate technology into teaching in higher education. I will undoubtedly have more to say about this topic once I am done reviewing their book.

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