What is the vision and strategy of universities on educational innovations?
In January of 2020, Caitlin Utama, CEL’s LDE Trainee, helped our PhD candidate Martine Schophuizen to collect and analyse data for her research project, which asked the question:"What is the vision and strategy of universities on educational innovations and how is this strategy implemented within these institutions to successfully embed educational innovations in the institution?"
The interviews and focus group that they conducted as part of this research revealed how scattered the field of educational innovation actually was, and that among those supporting educational innovations from within the Centers and Labs, there was a willingness to connect with fellow pioneers in education innovation outside of their University institutions.
This, in retrospect, became the start of Caitlin’s own research project to map out all the educational innovation initiatives and initiators in one complete network overview.
A community of educational innovators
Now, Caitlin is researching and collecting information on each University’s Education Innovation initiatives, starting with institutionalized Hubs or Centers for teaching, learning and innovation; what topics or themes these hubs are working on, who is working on them and what publications they have to their name, and how these innovative projects are embedded or shared. As the spreadsheet is growing, it has become clear that this information is useful and that it would be beneficial to share this overview outside of CEL.
Two ideas have sprung from this:
- To create a website which serves as a cohesive platform for all these initiatives, and shows clearly what projects are ongoing, who is working on these projects and at which University or hub. This website will contain a directory and will serve as a database for all the research that is being done in this field.
- To make an overview in the form of an interactive report, where you can read more about these hubs and centres and can easily access their sites with the click of a button.
The goal of these initiatives is to create a community of educational innovators which includes all the innovators and transcends institutions, in order to share knowledge, learn from each other’s experience and strengthen initiatives to innovate education.
At the present day, we are working hard to build the website, as CEL continues to collect more data on the hubs and their activities.
The Interactive Nexus report can be downloaded here:
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