IGHE Publications >
Volume 1, 20XX
IGHE Working Group on Educational Innovation - Executive Summary
DOI: http://doi.org/xxxxxxxxx
Introduction
As DKU emerged from the pandemic, the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs sought to further position the university as a site of ongoing educational and pedagogical innovation. He asked DKU’s Institute for Global Higher Education to convene a working group of faculty members and staff to study the global liberal arts, institution-wide learning objectives, and pedagogical principles and best practices. The Working Group issued three reports, and a summary of its recommendations appears below.
Context: Building a Cross-Cultural Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Investigate how pedagogical methods and ideas from Chinese educational traditions (such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) might enrich a liberal arts education and infuse a deeper understanding of East-Asian and Western concepts across the curriculum.
- Enhance support and incentives for international faculty to gain a deeper proficiency in Chinese and examine cultural similarities and differences in students’ attitudes toward grading and interactions with faculty.
- Identify and support opportunities for DKU faculty, students, and staff to learn about the challenges and opportunities for joint-venture universities and advance a distinctively DKU “rooted globalist” model of curricular and co-curricular education.
Coherence: Defining, Integrating, and Teaching Durable Skills
- Launch a process to define a set of signature DKU habits and skills that will be more operationalizable than the Animating Principles, more transferable than many of major-level learning outcomes, and more actionable than individual course objectives.
- Pilot experiments with key courses (Common Core, Chinese and EAP, two-credit writing, and large-enrollment), and gradually expand until core habits and skills are scaffolded across the curriculum.
- Support and reward faculty throughout the process of articulating and integrating skills into teaching practices and assessment.
Capabilities: Advancing Research and Practice in Teaching and Learning
- Expand the integration of well-established best practices in teaching into faculty training and evaluation including creating an accessible summary of best practices to guide the development and implementation of peerevaluation and faculty professionalization.
- Undertake systematic experimentation with emerging technologies and pedagogies including moving from lower- to higher-order learning, AI and Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and learning from errors.
- Develop reliable and authentic assessments of learning objectives and focus attention on maximizing learning in modular curricular structures.
