This short presentation “Linking Innovation in Teaching and Learning with Educational Research (in Higher Education)” discusses some opportunities and challenges for linking local practical innovations in teaching and learning with scholarly research that aims to produce shareable knowledge. It broadly builds on the work of the Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation.
The presentation includes some general notes about what is considered to be an innovation, in general, and in teaching and learning, in particular, in Australian context. It argues that opportunities for linking practical improvements in university’s teaching and learning with high-quality high-value knowledge-generating educational research are hugely underutilised. Local improvements in teaching and learning, particularly those that involve innovative uses of ICT, could hugely benefit from adopting more explicit knowledge-focused approaches to practical innovation. The presentation points out to two concrete approaches that could help to create this link at a micro (course, program, etc.) and community (organisation) levels, respectively:
- Design-based research and other approaches that aim to produce principled-practical knowledge and
- Innovation bootstrapping approach for creating innovating organisations.
Overall, innovation in teaching and learning in university settings is it self a phenomenon that needs much more deliberative innovation and research.
epistemic fluency 