INNOVATIONS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
CONFERENCE PAPER:
Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education:
findings from a research project
Paper given at the Society for Research into Higher Education conference on 'Innovation & Creativity in Teaching & Learning'
12-13 June 2000, University of Stirling, Scotland
Andrew Hannan
Reader in Education in the Faculty of Arts & Education of the University of Plymouth
Introduction
Harold Silver, Sue English and myself have recently completed a project on Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, as part of the ESRC's Learning Society programme . The first phase of the research (September 1997 - August 1998) focused on 'the experiences of innovators' and for the second phase (October 1998 - September 1999) a highly focused, intensive study was conducted of a relatively small number of universities in order to undertake case studies of the institutional contexts within which change in teaching and learning may take place. This paper will summarise some of the findings of the project and raise some wider issues for discussion (for a full account see Hannan and Silver, 2000) .
Method
For the purposes of the research project itself, we decided not to be too demanding in our definition of 'innovator'. We were not just looking for mould-breakers who had made global breakthroughs. We were interested in those who had introduced methods of teaching and learning new to their own situation, their own course, department or institution. These were planned rather than accidental changes, designed, but not guaranteed, to improve teaching and learning. We were interested here in the small as well as the large scale, in one-module innovations as well as those introduced across an institution or even on a national level, in the unfunded individual initiative as well as nationally funded projects. We were particularly interested in the learning/teaching interface, in the methods of teaching and learning, in 'pedagogy'. Obviously wider structural changes such as semesterisation and modularisation were part of this, but our focus was on the mode of delivery used by tutors and the methods of discovery used by students, the ways of teaching and of learning. Although we were concerned with curriculum changes and the impact they had on pedagogy, we were careful not to be diverted from our primary focus on attempts to introduce new methods of teaching and learning, even though the distinction was not always an easy one to make.The initial task was to decide at which higher education institutions there were clusters of likely people, ie those who were involved in introducing new methods of teaching and learning in undergraduate programmes. We chose our institutions to visit on the basis of the frequency of their appearance in various indices of innovation such as lists of Partnership Trust Award winners, Enterprise in Higher Education (EHE) and Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) directories, books and conferences on innovation, etc. We also endeavoured to include a wide geographic spread and a rough balance of representation from old and new universities. As a result of this process interviews were conducted at 15 institutions. Six of these were 'new' universities (former polytechnics which achieved university status in 1992) and nine were 'old' universities. Two of the latter were a former College of Advanced Technology and a former Scottish Central Institution which became universities in the 1960s, and one a 1960s 'green fields university'. Two of the 'old' universities were institutions of the University of Wales, two were in Scotland and one in Northern Ireland.
We asked universities to arrange interviews for us with those people we had identified from various publications as 'innovators' and we asked them to suggest to us the names of others who were involved in significant innovation and those in the institution who had particular or general responsibility for such matters. At this stage we were therefore also dealing with the staff of various educational development units (or similar) who might be thought of as having an insight into such matters across institutions.
A total of 221 interviews were conducted and taped and notes were made. The tapes were intended as a back up, and the notes were typed and subsequently analysed (using HyperQual) alongside supporting documentation relating to the work of individual innovators and to institutional policies concerning teaching and learning. An initial analysis of the information collected was discussed on a return visit to the institution where we had conducted our pilot study and at a mini-conference with representatives from each of the universities we had visited. The general content of our findings was confirmed by these meetings, which also provided guidance for the second phase of the project.
The focus for the second-year case study visits was the institutions, their structures and processes affecting teaching and learning, and the position of innovation in these contexts and cultures. Five universities were selected, with one exception, from the first-phase list. The exception is the Open University, which it was not possible to include in the type of investigation conducted in the first phase, but which was very important for the second phase, partly because of its particular style of operation and partly because it is UK-wide. Of the remaining 4 institutions, 3 were in England and one in Scotland. The English universities included one of the 'older' universities (Nottingham), one '1960s' university (Salford) and one 'new' university (Middlesex). The Scottish university was Glasgow.
The research strategy was to approach these processes, and perceptions of them, from 'top down' and 'bottom up' directions. The former covered the roles and views of senior administrators, heads of selected units (mainly faculties and departments), and key players in the policy- and decision-making committee structures of the University. For the 'bottom up' approach it was decided to talk mainly to lecturers randomly chosen from lists of teaching staff in two subject areas in each institution. A total of 117 individual interviews took place (34 at Glasgow, 17 at Nottingham, 21 at Middlesex, 22 at Salford and 23 at the Open University), with a rough balance of 'top down' and 'bottom up' in each institution. This strategy of collecting data from staff at different levels of the institutional hierarchy proved a great success as a means of exploring the perceptions of the various participants.
We also held six focus group discussions with members of academic staff (part of the 'bottom up' approach). These discussions proved particularly rich as a source of data concerning the views of those whose jobs were principally concerned with teaching (and sometimes research), who were in closest contact with the students and often saw themselves as charged with carrying out rather than instigating institutional policies.
Findings
From our review of the literature and our own investigations, we found that over the past half century there seem to have been three interlocking themes, which have to some extent been overlapping phases, in the history of innovation within institutions of higher education. These were:'individual innovation' (drawing on the ideas of enthusiasts);
'guided innovation' (often supported by institutional funds derived from national programmes such as EHE and somewhat loosely connected to guiding notions about improving teaching and learning); and,
'directed innovation' (driven by institutional imperatives often aimed at maximising returns on investment in new technologies or promoting more student-centred learning partly for reasons of efficiency).
These themes are more fully discussed in Silver (1999).
Types of innovation
Table 1 indicates the wide variety of types of innovation identified by those we interviewed in phase one. However, it was not always possible to fit projects neatly under a specific heading, hence the use of the category 'Others'. It is also apparent that the categories we have employed overlap, that some innovations might be included in more than one and that several staff were involved in a range of innovative projects of different types. Nevertheless, the table serves to illustrate the range of activities we discussed and something of their relative frequency.
TABLE 1: Types of innovation undertaken by those interviewed in phase one
1. Making use of computers
(Web, Internet, Intranet, Computer Aided Learning, Computer Based Learning, Computer Mediated Communication)77 2. Skills (personal, transferable, key, core, employability, communication and
problem-solving)45 3. Team projects, group learning (co-operation and collaboration) 40 4. Student presentations (individual or group) 16 5. Interactive seminars or lectures
16 6. Work-Based Learning
16 7. Problem-Based Learning
16 8. Resource-Based Learning (packages, booklets, etc)
14 9. Distance Learning or Open Learning
12 10. Peer-Tutoring, -Mentoring or -Assessment
9 11. Others: (eg student-directed learning, learning journals/ portfolios, profiling, reflective practice) 18 Reasons for innovation
From our first phase interviews with 'innovators' it was apparent how important tutors' personal commitment to teaching and to their students was to their individual efforts to innovate. The most popular reason given for involvement in innovation was to improve student learning. However, there were many who were obliged to change their methods due to circumstances beyond their control, particularly an increase in student numbers or a shift in student intake. In general it seems that innovators will take on extra work, learn new skills, court unpopularity with other staff and take risks with their own careers so long as they feel that by doing so they can improve the quality of their teaching, and/or, if they feel that circumstances are such that they have no choice but to depart from their old methods to cope with new demands .
Change in higher education is driven by a number of forces including the demands of employers, government policy initiatives and attempts by 'teachers' in universities to meet the changing needs of students and to reflect the changing nature of their subject matter. But inertia, or resistance to change, is also heavily supported by a range of factors. For certain institutions the nature of their intake has remained more or less constant, the demands of employers fairly distant and the temptations of government advocated reforms generally resistible, despite the necessity of some token effort. The higher education sector is, of course, highly differentiated, with the obvious divide between 'new' and 'old' universities (pre- and post-1992), well illustrated by the league table of Research Assessment Exercise performance, with a fairly neat division between them in terms of quality ratings at about the half way point. However, there are also divisions within institutions and even within departments. Even in the most research-oriented of old universities there are lecturers who see themselves primarily as having a teaching role and in the most progressive of new universities, aiming at becoming student-centred learning centres, there are those who strongly aspire to international levels of research excellence. For many 'academics', a term which they would much prefer to 'teachers', their subject remains paramount and their expertise is measured by their research output rather than the quality of learning experienced by their students.Promoters and inhibitors of innovation
Overall, drawing on both the first phase survey of innovators and the five institutional case studies of the second phase, we found that -
Innovation in teaching and learning is most likely to take place when:
a) the innovator has encouragement or support from the head of department, dean or other person in authority;
b) the institution has a policy establishing parity between research and teaching and learning, including for purposes of promotion, and the policy is reflected in practice;
c) colleagues and people in authority show an interest in disseminating the outcomes of innovation;
d) resources are available through the department, an innovations or similar fund and an education development unit.Innovation is most likely to be obstructed by:
a) low esteem of teaching and learning, compared with research;
b) lack of recognition and interest by colleagues and people in authority;
c) institutional or other policies and action plans laying down firm directions that preclude individual, alternative initiatives;
d) excessively bureaucratic procedures for approval, support and resources;
e) quality assessment procedures that inhibit risk taking.Implications for the relationship between policy-makers and practitioners
The sociology of innovation in education has long demonstrated that there is a significant gap between what policy-makers want and what practitioners do. Top-down innovation often results in unpredicted consequences, where those charged with implementing the new scheme or way of working subvert its purpose in order to make it comply with their own definition of what's best. There are ways, of course, of trying to prevent this. One is to seek to control the practitioners through imposing constraints, using inspections and league tables tied to financial incentives and penalties, in order to change their behaviour in accordance with the wishes of the policy-makers. However, there are a number of problems with this:-1. The practitioners eventually learn how to 'play the game', ie to comply with the requirements in a superficial manner in order obtain the necessary scores whilst retaining as much of their previous way of doing things as possible.
2. The process of ensuring compliance with the policy-makers' intentions inevitably focuses more attention on those aspects that are more easily measured. These may not be the most important.
3. The surveillance itself takes up a great deal of time and resources. For instance, no-one doubts that 'subject review' has led to increased attention to matters to do with teaching and learning, but at what cost in terms of time and energy that might otherwise have been spent on that teaching and learning itself?
4. Those institutions or departments that do well are rewarded and those that do badly are punished, but those in the latter category are often already disadvantaged and failure merely reinforces this, with no resources being given to raise those at what have been measured as lower levels of performance.On the other hand, there is the so-called 'bottom-up' approach that gives the lead to the practitioners themselves. Our research produced many examples of 'hero' innovators, or what Taylor (1998) dubbed 'lone rangers'. Although these people were sometimes supported by internal or external 'innovation funds', they struggled to convince others of the relevance of their work, to get it accepted by those within their departments in their own institutions (often having more success externally within their subject community). They had even more difficulty convincing staff outside their departments. The problem with relying on self-initiated change is that those who are most in need of it may be those most reluctant to recognise this fact. Many proposals for change are a threat to established power relations, they challenge the status quo and imply that someone is currently 'getting it wrong'. Defensiveness is a natural reaction. Nonetheless, some practitioner-initiated changes have succeeded in becoming adopted, breaking through the barriers of departmental and even institutional inertia to become the new norm. As would follow from the lists given above, this has happened where the conditions have existed for support, dissemination and promotion, both of the idea and of its exponents, the latter both in the status and financial sense. I would argue that this process is likely to be enhanced by a tactic of inclusion, of involving practitioners, winning them over, learning from them, convincing them, winning their 'hearts and minds' rather than dragging them unwillingly along behind some new-fangled management-inspired notion. There is evidence to suggest that when such new ways of doing things are given the imprimatur of national recognition by the subject community, the chances of their wider adoption increase significantly. In this regard, the new subject-based Learning and Teaching Support Network (HEFCE, 1999) is building on academic cultures that are already well established.
One of the greatest dangers in the process of introducing change in higher education is that the new ideas become sites for struggle, between managers with their own agenda and those more directly responsible for teaching and learning with theirs. We found a considerable difference of perspective between the senior managers and the lecturers we interviewed particularly when the latter were gathered in 'focus groups'. Many lecturers, many of whom had no track record as 'innovators', were highly suspicious of the rhetoric of change, seeing hidden motives behind new initiatives. What senior managers see as a move to 'Student-Centred Learning' or SCL, the lecturing staff may well see as 'Staff Cuts Looming'. It's partly a battle about control, about preserving what's left of academic freedom, of relative autonomy, about resisting 'them' who know little about what we do and don't understand what's needed and giving more power to the 'us' who know what it's like at the student-lecturer interface. Of course, this polarisation is more marked in some institutions than others and our research showed that those institutions where the gap was least had created the most favourable climate for agreed change.
Any discussion of such matters needs to be placed in a wider context. UK higher education institutions are expanding their number and range of students, aiming to meet new requirements in terms of the eventual employability of their graduates and to provide 'lifelong learning' for a 'learning society'. Alongside these newer demands, more traditional aims for higher education the development of 'critical thinking' persist. Any changes that are introduced have to ensure the maintenance if not the raising of 'quality' in both teaching and research, with little hope of extra public funding and with a requirement for continuing 'efficiency gains'. Chief among the various means by which these demands are to be met is the hope that methods of learning and teaching can be developed and adopted that will meet the needs of more, and more diverse, students, within resource constraints. Innovations in 'pedagogy' are looked for that will both enhance the quality of the student learning experience and reduce its demands on staff time, with information and communications technology being widely seen as the means of achieving this. This is why struggles over the introduction of new methods of learning and teaching in higher education have assumed such importance.
Conclusion
One of the problems with the notion of 'innovation' is that it is often used in a way that assumes the changes being proposed are 'good' and that any resistance to them is inevitably 'bad'. The notion of 'change' is not so prone to this assumption, but the idea that we need to identify the 'barriers' to change implies the same sort of reasoning. Let me take some examples. In the 1990s a great surge of semesterization and modularisation swept through UK higher education institutions. This was seen as innovation, the way of the future. Resistance in some institutions was considered reactionary, attempts to circumvent it were close to sabotage. Of course, Oxbridge maintained antiquated terms and Durham University moved only to whole year modules, but elsewhere the shift took place with whole courses being re-written and re-validated (at the cost of enormous effort) to fit into modules and semesters. This was supposedly done in order to allow for flexibility, for students to mix modules from different programmes and even different institutions and to allow for exchanges of students with institutions overseas. In reality little of this has happened. On the whole, even those relatively few 'full-time' students who interrupt their studies still tend to attend for whole years rather than six months at a time. It is still the case that single-subject degrees with limited interdisciplinary mixing predominate rather than combined subject programmes designed to exploit the variety supposedly available. In reality, much of the re-writing disguised continuity, with the paper-work changing, but the pattern of teaching and learning being much as before. Perhaps the biggest exception to this is in the area of assessment, which tended to double in volume, with assessment points coming twice rather than once a year. Even this, though, has been circumvented with 'double-modules' and other such devices. On balance and with hindsight, semesterization and modularisation do not look to be quite so good as we once supposed them to be. Doubtless, similar things could be said of other innovations championed by policy-makers at various times.There is the possibility, then, that change needs to be resisted, that we should applaud those aspects of institutional or academic cultures that construct barriers to change. This applies, of course, only when that change is undesirable, although this may well not be apparent at first in the flush of excitement about the new and fashionable. The fundamental point I'm trying to make here is that we should really be addressing specific 'changes' rather than 'change' as such. The problems of implementation have an element of specificity in terms of the nature of the transformation proposed and, I would argue, in relation to the source of the idea.
I shall finish by highlighting some points for discussion:
1. We need to provide well-researched evidence for what works best so that change is driven by the well-founded expectation of improvement rather than hopes pinned on the latest fad. We haven't got the time or resources to make many more mistakes. Too much of what is written about new approaches to teaching and learning in HE, particularly that which champions the adoption of new technologies, is more like advocacy and less like analysis.
2. We can't simply rely on the practitioners to get things right. We need a system that urges them to improve, that gives them well-researched examples of what works better and helps them to change. Some of our lecturers are the solution, but some still constitute a major element of the problem.
3. Nonetheless, for improvements to take place, for it is improvement we are presumably after rather than change per se, we must take the practitioners seriously. We must find ways of recognising their concerns, of giving a higher priority to their perspectives, of making the process one with which they identify.References
Hannan, A., English, S. & Silver, H. (1999) "Why Innovate? Some preliminary findings from a research project on Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education", Studies in Higher Education, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 279-28.Hannan, A. and Silver, H. (2000) Innovating in Higher Education: teaching, learning and institutional cultures, Buckingham, Open University Press.
HEFCE (1999) Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund: funding arrangements, Bristol, HEFCE.
Silver, H. (1999) "Managing to Innovate in Higher Education", British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 145-156.
Taylor, P. (1998) "Institutional Change in Uncertain Times: lone ranging is not enough", Studies in Higher Education, 23, 3, pp. 269-279.
Notes
ESRC reference numbers L123251071 and L12325107.
The project web site (at http://www.fae.plym.ac.uk/itlhe.html) contains a full list of publications, a summary of findings, a report on the first phase, two working papers, two bibliographies and four conference papers.
The following working papers and bibliographies are also published in the electronic journal EducatiON-LINE (at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol):
Silver, H. (1997) The Languages of Innovation: listening to the higher education literature, Working Paper 1.
Silver, H., Hannan, A., and English, S. (1998) 'Innovation': questions of boundary, Working Paper 2.
Silver, H. (1998) Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: an annotated bibliography.
Silver, H., Hannan, A. and English, S. (1998) The experiences of innovators: a preliminary report of the first year of the project Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
Silver, H. (1998) Organisational Culture and Innovation in Higher Education: an annotated bibliography of organisational culture and related concepts of importance to investigating the place of innovation in higher education institutions.
These issues are more fully discussed in Hannan, English and Silver (1999).
The original quality assurance arrangements in Scotland and the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning of Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) were based on such principles, with extra funding being given as a reward to those departments that had excelled. Clearly the 'institutional strand' of the new Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund initiative from HEFCE (1999) is an attempt to get away from this sort of hierarchy of reward, with all institutions being entitled to the money available providing they possess satisfactory learning and teaching strategies.
At the time of writing it is unclear how the newly formed Institute for Learning and Teaching will be situated in this battle of competing perspectives as it is currently concentrating on accreditation, often seen as a matter of increasing control over academics, rather than acting as a professional body championing the views of its members. However, its potential for acting as a source of support for innovation and a means for its promotion are considerable.
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