Naming and measuring the elephants

Sustainable change for blended learning

Abstract

Educational development work to replace traditional campus university teaching with more innovative blended learning activities usually involves articulating and questioning assumptions about disciplinary learning. But the assumptions built into the discipline and institutional organizational systems for managing study times and staff workload planning can block innovation. Several previous projects have established that intensive team workshops over 2-3 days, involving support staff working with academics to produce real outputs, can build sustainable capacity for curriculum innovation within academic units. This paper describes current work in one university that makes use of disciplinary curriculum mapping and explicit planning of academic and student workload in the educational design activity. Two pilots in different disciplines are being used to develop a model that can be applied and contextualized as part of a broader sustainable blended learning strategy.