An Engagement Levels Framework To Foster Interactions Across SOTL Collaboratories

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Date
2009-10
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International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Abstract
Regional SoTL collaboratories can provide a natural fit with political boundaries and funding opportunities; interconnections across regions can provide critical mass to sustain ongoing community interactions. It is unrealistic to expect these facilities to use a common technical platform or to adopt common social organizations, so a Framework for interconnection would be valuable. Our prototype Engagement Levels Framework includes four levels of faculty involvement, each with differing facilities to support research and knowledge mobilization: Cooperative Research Projects: Faculty who engage with a Teaching Research Collaboratory through specific short-term supported projects, as individuals and as teams, primarily focused on enhancing the learning experience and student success in their own courses and with some secondary focus on enhancing teaching practice for their colleagues at the institutional or provincial levels (and beyond). This secondary focus requires some effort to distinguish localized versus generalizable factors contributing to the success or limitations of an intervention in teaching. Practitioner/Researcher Core Communities: Faculty with an ongoing mutual engagement as a community, functioning both as an inquiry community to enhance the learning experience and student success in their own courses and as the core of a larger community of practitioner/researchers in research-led teaching, including developing and sustaining knowledge mobilization resources to enhance research-led teaching practices and knowledge by their faculty colleagues. Knowledge Exchange Networks: Faculty who participate periodically in knowledge mobilization for their own research-led teaching and become regular contributors to a knowledge mobilization network, motivated by a spirit of scholarly reciprocity and by explicit engagement initiatives led by the core Practitioner/Researcher community members described above. Collections of Research-Informed Resources for Teaching: To achieve a true ‘network effect’ in application of the knowledge and resources for research-led teaching, facilities must be provided to engage many more faculty in occasional access. These faculty seek to improve the learning experience and student success in their own courses, but do not regularly contribute from their own expertise to extend those resources. The key ideas underlying this framework include the following: • Modularity in the framework allows multiple platform options at each level • Embedding of research results into adaptable artifacts – curriculum plans, learning activity designs, open educational resources, etc. – promotes knowledge mobilization; • Early involvement of resource creators with colleagues promotes reusability and adaptability of such resources, and optimizes institutional investment in faculty innovation and scholarship; • Ongoing knowledge exchange is fostered by a focus on object-centered conversations to extend knowledge, adapt resources and share insights; • Collection management enables occasional users to find the resources they seek and to encounter related teaching knowledge along with those resources; • Explicit efforts by the collaboratory community will support enriched levels of engagement by colleagues, to insure a sustainable and dynamic community. Of course, such facilities can only enable and support widespread adaptation of research-informed resources and mobilization of the underlying knowledge about teaching and learning. We must in parallel work with partners in our regions and disciplines to provide stronger rationale and motivation for mobilizing SoTL as research-led teaching.
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Repository, Collaboratory, Knowledge exchange, Best practices
Citation
Carey, Tom and Lopes, Valerie. 2009. "An Engagement Levels Framework To Foster Interactions Across SOTL Collaboratories". Poster presented at the 6th annual conference for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. October 22-25, 2009: Bloomington, IN.
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