Development and propagation: A case study of the AIChE concept warehouse

Propagation is a widespread goal of education materials development. If an educational innovation is effective in one environment, many developers want to share it with other instructors and institutions to have a larger impact and improve education more broadly. Studying the propagation process is one way to learn more about the aspects that contribute to propagation of particular educational innovations and aspects that hinder propagation. We report on the early stages of propagation of the Concept Warehouse (CW), a database-driven website developed to support the chemical engineering education community's use of concept-based pedagogies. We hope to inform other developers as well as learn how we can further support propagation of this innovation. Specifically we focus on the propagation strategies used by the developers of the tool and how these strategies have changed over time. We found that the developers focused heavily on creating a network and used workshops as one strategy towards that end. However, not all workshops appeared to have the same effectiveness. Workshops deemed most effective by the developers were those that tied into already existing community networks where the CW portion was part of a longer (multiple day) workshop focused on pedagogy and instruction. Finally, we provide a section with the developers' advice to others who may be considering propagating educational innovations.