Reimagining the dissemination of engineering education practices through a global learning partnership

BACKGROUND Emerging amongst the many calls to transform engineering education is a push to replace the traditional lecture with online video ‘content’ and couple this with collaborative active learning on campus. The interest in this Flipped Classroom approach is mirrored by the global MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) phenomenon. Both point to the need to reimagine the online and on-campus environments to ensure successful recruitment and retention of students, whilst maintaining the focus on learning outcomes. One large-scale (1000 students) Flipped Classroom implementation was demonstrated at The University of Queensland in 2012 and has generated significant attention both nationally and internationally due to its unique pedagogical design, leading to an international research collaboration with the aim of exploring opportunities and connections towards reimagining the future of online and on-campus learning environments. The first event in this collaboration was a workshop held at Stanford in May 2013 which forms the focus of this paper. PURPOSE This work builds on new forms of open scholarly communication with the goal of accelerating systemic change in engineering education. That is, we are attempting to organise ourselves utilising the principles of Baxter Magolda’s “Learning Partnership” (2012) to transfer practice and disseminate for impact faster than would be expected in the traditional manner. This paper is the beginning of an answer to the question of how a learning partnership can be made to work across national and disciplinary boundaries and how such a partnership may impact on the forms and dissemination of flipped classrooms. APPROACH The Stanford workshop was constructed around planning a research project focussing on the integrated use of Flipped Classrooms and MOOCs at the participant institutions. Program Logic was used as a framework for the two-day event and throughout the workshop Learning Partnership techniques were employed. This was effected through the use of the SAID approach (Situation, Affect, Interpretation, Decision) for structured journal writing and extended into participant sharing. The workshop made innovative use of artefacts as a prompt to collaborative planning and events and outcomes were summarised in visual form. Here we consider how this open communication and mutual construction of understandings about the project have helped to develop our Learning Partnership and influenced our thinking on what such a partnership is and what it can accomplish. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES Participants found the open nature of the conversations to be stimulating and challenging. The approach described here meant that discussions included a depth of insight that is not found when participants are working in a more formal setting. As a result we have been able to develop a common understanding of what Flipped Classrooms are and how this project needs to study them that would have been hard to articulate using normal academic modes of communication and collaboration. CONCLUSIONS The time pressures experienced by the academic often do not allow for creating, implementing and operating, as well as disseminating through the traditional means of publication. The Learning Partnership approach offers a new way to collaborate and provide broad dissemination, although its implementation is not straight-forward.