Higher education institutions conduct pilot after pilot centered on digital teaching and learning initiatives, but the lessons learned from these projects are often lost. What if there was a way to better share results with similar colleges and universities in order to improve scalability and impact?
Time and again, institutions of higher education undertake initiatives around digital teaching and learning practices. These institutions often develop pilots in order to determine what works well, what does not, how they can make improvements, or if they need to abandon them and try something else. Often times, top-down efforts are siloed and do not include a diverse set of stakeholders in the decision-making process, reducing buy-in and leaving out key nodes during implementation. Bottom-up pilots frequently do not have institutional support and tend to be isolated to small groups of instructors or researchers. When pilots are abandoned or scaled, many of the lessons learned from the process are lost along the way.
However, is there a way that we can better leverage these pilots and the data that they generate in order to help improve the scalability of effective digital teaching and learning practices more broadly? Is it possible to help cluster institutions around contexts, needs, and capacities so that they can learn from what others have done, thereby potentially decreasing costs, accelerating timelines, and increasing data-driven decision-making? This session will center around a conversation pertaining to these questions and how we can collectively work to minimize pain points, improve communication, and create a resource that holds the potential to improve student outcomes.
We will facilitate a discussion around these questions, having attendees work in small groups of different backgrounds. The session will make use of sticky flip charts and markers in order to visually share ideas with others. Participants will engage with us and each other to develop a key set of takeaways that will be shared with them following the event and that they will be able to use at their own institutions. Given that these complex questions cannot be fully answered in a 45-minute session, attendees will also be invited to continue the conversation after the event.