EAA@ERAU: IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach that puts academic experimentation into action in ways that attract and engage both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.
Project Details
This project, inspired by my current activities as an Academic Innovation Research (AIR) Fellow, recognizes that it's all well and good to develop and trial innovative teaching, class design, or assessment techniques in a handful of classes; but it's quite another to get prospective students to come to ERAU, take such new and different courses, and have all benefit from the experiences.
What's Needed: More of an experimental, "Skunk Works" life cycle approach to innovation in teaching.
SUBMITTED as a proposal to the Academic Innovation 2023 Virtual Conference, Rothwell Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence.
CONCEPT:
Throughout the history of aviation, the "experimental mindset" has been the driving force behind the development of new approaches and ideas. Experimenters have transformed aviation time and time again. Clearly, the vast majority of flights are anything but experimental; those flights have business needs to attend to, or mission objectives to accomplish.
But that "test pilot" mindset, that experimenter view, is alive and well throughout the aviation and aerospace community across the world. And the notion of going to an Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In event, like at Oshkosh, WI, excites every one of us.
We at ERAU know this; it's in our blood.
We just don't do this very well, if at all, with our classes or our teaching. Okay, yes, a few of us do innovate around the edges; we tweak approaches and try new tools and new techniques.
Which none of our students ever find out BEFORE they walk into our classrooms, virtual or physical.
IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach, that puts academic experimentation into action, in ways that attract the attention of both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.
An EAA strategy for Worldwide needs to gently touch many different aspects of many different business processes here at Worldwide; processes that must be rock-solid, well-oiled and well-scaled for our production, mainline course deliveries, term after term.
As a concept exploration and demonstration, this project will build on the AIR Fellows Program's approach to having a small handful of innovative "pilot" courses ready to launch in the coming calendar year as context, feasibility study, and as the test case to show that an EAA strategy is necessary (but not sufficient) for such innovations to have a chance of success.
Challenging many of the conventional wisdom factors about the "current" "best" ways of doing our business of course development, production, teaching, and assessment, by placing those within a messaging strategy that disrupts hearts and minds without requiring a full-scale disruption of existing business, marketing, outreach, enrollment, advising, course production, teaching, and assessment processes.