CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT: SENSE-MAKING OF CONVERGENCE OF INSTITUTIONAL INITIATIVES ON DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

The introduction of various educational initiatives in Singapore Polytechnic (SP), notably those based on using digital educational technologies (EdTech) tools at different levels of applications (institution, program, cohort, individual) had resulted in faculty feeling overwhelmed by the changes while trying to balance the demand of their day-to-day teaching duties. Examples include flipped classroom, growth mindset, self-directed learning and learning analytics, etc. Consequently, faculty failed to see the underpinning pedagogical considerations driving these initiatives and often tend to focus on implementing whatever a particular initiative required, “just to keep up”. On the other hand, the CDIO Framework has been used as a basis for continual improvement to guide various curricular redesign efforts over the years, whereby each initiative is implemented by referencing the relevant CDIO Standards. This paper proposes using the “lens of CDIO” to help faculty “connect the dots” between the seemingly disparate efforts to make sense of the situation, via a generic convergence model. For context, the paper first shares the key features of the initiatives for flipped classroom, learning analytics and ALeRT, which stands for Assessing Learning Regularly for Timely Support. The paper then shares how they can be harmonized via an initiative called Data-Enabled Flipped Learning (DEFL in short), within which another initiative of differentiated instructions was introduced. The stated overall aim of DEFL is to support the development of students’ self-directed learning competency. The paper provides explanations of how DEFL can be supported by the CDIO Framework as well as where it is situated in Academic Quality Management Framework of SP, to highlight the importance of the convergence as part of the institution’s drive towards continual improvement of its programs. Thereafter the paper also suggests how current on-going initiatives and future ones can also be harmonized using the proposed model, suggesting the model’s scalability to accommodate other initiatives. Examples where in-progress initiatives can be situated include a faculty digital competency framework and future learning workspaces. Lastly, the paper concludes with a discussion emphasizing the importance of having a ”human-in-the-loop” and continual faculty professional development for the integration of digital Edtech tools into the curriculum, calling for a concerted effort of faculty to engage with these tools in a productive way focusing on innovations in teaching and learning that maximize student learning outcomes.