This article aims to show the results of implementing a training methodology in a group of participants within an intensive course on educational innovation. The motivation for this course was to promote innovative ideas that could be scaled into possible open educational entrepreneurship projects. Based on descriptive statistical analysis, that…

This paper reports on the development of a lecturer's conceptions of teaching through formal training and explores how evolving conceptions of teaching impact on their plans and practices in teaching. In this study, lecturers who are participants in the University of London Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCertHE) wrote narratives…

Sustainability action at universities is complex and requires engaging multiple competences that reside on different levels outside and inside the organisation. In addition to individual competences, social communities also possess collective resources and characteristics that do not translate into a sum of individual abilities. Based on a…

Academic excellence is brought about by effective leadership, which may encompass the concept of distributed leadership, which signifies a collective engagement. However, leadership positions within higher education are frequently filled with scholars lacking leadership skills and experience, which can be detrimental both to their performance and…

Educators face the challenge of continually adapting and evolving their pedagogy to meet the needs of diverse learners. Learner experience design (LX) is a human-centered approach to curriculum and assessment development that is easily learned, adaptable, and repeatable. It focuses on empathy for students and creative problem-solving. In this…

Both 'collegiality' and 'distributed leadership' have, as terms, occasioned a good deal of debate. Conceptually elastic, they are often used interchangeably, or not appreciated as embodying a range of leadership styles and relationships. Spurred by an unanswered query from a research project, this theoretical article attempts to clarify what the…

Big ideas, sometimes referred to as key, core, fundamental or threshold concepts, are widely applicable concepts at the heart of disciplines that are or have been central and influential for their fields. Attention here is particularly directed to meta-concepts common to sister disciplines in the sciences. "Learning thresholds",…

The present study takes a novel quantitative approach to examine whether the change mechanisms hypothesized by conceptual change theories are involved in reconceptualizing teaching from a teacher-centred to a student-centred approach. We assessed changes in approaches to teaching, measured with the Approaches to Teaching Inventory-Revised (ATI-R),…

Embedded within advice for starting simple with online, blended, or technology-enhanced teaching are practices that can be troublesome for some faculty who are learning to teach this way. For example, embedded within the principle of a clear, organized, navigable course can be the "concept" of chunking content into modules, the…

In this chapter we describe the Decoding the Disciplines Faculty Learning Community at Mount Royal University and how Decoding has been used in new and multidisciplinary ways in the various teaching, curriculum, and research projects that are presented in detail in subsequent chapters.

Higher education students, formally adults, are nevertheless subject to adultism. The co-authors of this article--the director of the Students as Teachers and Learners (SaLT) program and three undergraduates who have worked in pedagogical partnership with faculty through SaLT--discuss how this program counters adultism on three levels:…

Universities aspire to offer students a transformative experience, but rarely spell out the nature of this transformation. In this essay, L. A. Paul and John Quiggin frame the successful university education as transformative in the philosophical sense. They explain the way that a successful college education can be understood as generating an…

Organic agriculture courses and degrees in higher education have become more common in recent decades. In this article, we characterized instructor priorities for organic agriculture education and identified critical concepts and skills to be included in curriculum. We used interviews and surveys to learn from 19 instructors from universities and…

Abstract concepts dominate university science teaching, and much of this content is taught without sufficient connection to students' prior knowledge or everyday experiences. As this can be problematic for students, the aim of this research was to determine the utility and effectiveness of a professional development module on using analogies to…

Systems thinking is recognized as an essential skill for understanding complex problem solving and decision making associated with many of the contemporary issues faced by individuals and communities. In this article, our goal is to contribute to the knowledge of curriculum and pedagogy of formal systems thinking teaching in higher education. We…