Session Description
After four decades of experimentation in higher education with teaching and learning technologies, commonly known as elearning, the sustainability of elearning innovations is emerging as a priority for many universities. This new concern is occurring in universities at a senior management level, driven by top-down large-scale investments in Learning Management Systems and experiments with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in response to global competition for students. Meanwhile, the harnessing of digital technologies at the grassroots level of higher education teaching practice continues to represent the efforts of just a few ‘lone’ innovators and early adopters. Even when elearning innovations in teaching practice are proven to be effective, very few become widely adopted within the originating faculty. This gap in the spread of adoption is described in the research literature as a ‘chasm’ in the diffusion process. The study reported in this presentation applies the development of an agent-based computer simulation model to investigate the dynamic complexities of the enabling and inhibiting interactions that occur between and within macro (management), meso (support services) and micro (teaching practice) levels within universities during the diffusion process. The computer simulation provides an interactive ‘big picture’ artefact that is ‘more than the sum of its parts’ to enable the elicitation of implications for university wide change management strategies and processes. In applying this methodology, derived from the complexity sciences, this study seeks to answer the question: How can universities support the sustainable diffusion of proven elearning innovations that originate in higher education teaching practice?
Presenter(s)
- Irena White, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, irena.white@flinders.edu.au
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