Social Innovation in Higher Education


Book Description

This open access book offers unique and novel views on the social innovation landscape, tools, practices, pedagogies, and research in the context of higher education. International, multi-disciplinary academics and industry leaders present new developments, research evidence, and practice expertise on social innovation in higher education institutions (HEIs), across academic and professional disciplines. The book includes a selected set of peer-reviewed chapters presenting different perspectives against which relevant actors can identify and analyse social innovation in HEIs. The volume demonstrates how HEIs can respond to societal challenges, support positive social change, and contribute to the development of international public policy discourse. It answers the question ‘how does the present higher education system, in different countries, promote social innovation and create social change and impact’. In answering this question, the book identifies factors driving success as well as obstacles. Furthermore, it examines how higher education innovation assists societal challenges and investigates the benefits of effective social innovation engagement by HEIs. The interdisciplinary approach of the volume makes it a must-read for scholars, students, policy-makers, and practitioners of economics, education, business and management, political science, and sociology interested in a better understanding of social innovation.




Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education


Book Description

Giving higher education professionals the language and tools they need to seize new opportunities in digital learning. A quiet revolution is sweeping across US colleges and universities. As schools rethink how students learn - both inside and outside the classroom - technology is changing not only what should be taught but how best to teach it. From active learning and inclusive pedagogy to online and hybrid courses, traditional institutions are leveraging their fundamental strengths while challenging long-standing assumptions about how teaching and learning happen. At this intersection of learning, technology, design, and organizational change lies the foundation of a new academic discipline of digital learning. Coalescing around this new field of study is a common critical language, along with a set of theoretical frameworks, methodological practices, and shared challenges and goals. In Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education, Joshua Kim and Edward Maloney explore the context of this new discipline, show how it exists within a larger body of scholarship, and give examples of how this scholarship is being used on campuses. What Kim and Maloney demonstrate in this foundational text is an understanding that change is a complex dynamic between what happens in the classroom and the larger institutional structures and traditions at play. Ultimately, the authors make a compelling case not only for this turn to learning but also for creating new pathways for nonfaculty learning careers, understanding the limits of professional organizations and social media, and the need to establish this new interdisciplinary field of learning innovation.




Reinventing Higher Education


Book Description

The inspiration for this timely book is the pressing need for fresh ideas and innovations in U.S. higher education. At the heart of the volume is the realization that higher education must evolve in fundamental ways if it is to respond to changing professional, economic, and technological circumstances, and if it is to successfully reach and prepare a vast population of students—traditional and nontraditional alike—for success in the coming decades. This collection of provocative articles by leading scholars, writers, innovators, and university administrators examines the current higher education environment and its chronic resistance to change; the rise of for-profit universities; the potential future role of community colleges in a significantly revised higher education realm; and the emergence of online learning as a means to reshape teaching and learning and to reach new consumers of higher education. Combining trenchant critiques of current conditions with thought-provoking analyses of possible reforms and new directions, Reinventing Higher Education is an ambitious exploration of possible future directions for revitalized American colleges and universities.




Higher Education and Innovation


Book Description

This book highlights the design of an educational module for an innovative intensive program. The theme is very relevant in the contemporary approach to teaching activities. In fact, thanks to the didactic design, it is possible to obtain a strong relationship between teachers and learners, as required by the Bologna Process. It also allows a stronger definition of learning outcomes. After a general excursus on the subject, the manuscript refers to a recent experience carried out in the Aeolian Island for the Erasmus + Programme, called VVITA. In it, an international group of students and teachers spent a period in the Aeolian Islands, to focus on the features of local vernacular architecture. The attention has been addressed to the Aeolian House, which is a wonderful example of ante litteram sustainable architecture. On the island of Filicudi, one of the most beautiful of the archipelago, it has preserved its characteristics intact. The book is completed by teachers’ lectures and students’ final reports.




Decision-Based Learning


Book Description

In this book you will read stories told by faculty who have redesigned their university courses using the Decision-Based Learning pedagogy and the impact this powerful strategy can have on student learning. It should be of use to anyone teaching and designing curricula in higher education settings.




Handbook of Research on Enhancing Innovation in Higher Education Institutions


Book Description

Innovation in higher education is a process of institutional adaptation to changes in the environment that enables higher education institutions to improve their existing practice and to be innovative at different levels and in different forms. Moreover, innovativeness is also related to internal characteristics of higher education institutions. Innovation in higher education can be observed as a result of the changing contexts in which higher education institutions function. Adjacently, a comprehensive approach to considering innovativeness is needed in order to enable the examination of different elements of innovativeness in higher education, that is, to identify the key factors that (de)stimulate innovations and affect their interactions with other relevant stakeholders at the national level and beyond. The Handbook of Research on Enhancing Innovation in Higher Education Institutions is a critical scholarly book that examines innovativeness in higher education and its complications and diversity. Starting from the view that higher education is currently confronted by global forces that require new research ideas, the publication suggests that comprehensive understanding of innovativeness is imperative for higher education’s institutions in the 21st century. Analyzing the recognized trends within the publication and concluding which aspects should be taken to improve innovativeness in higher education, this reference book outlines quality and innovation in teaching, innovative university-business cooperation, institutional framework and governance of higher education institutions, knowledge management, and leadership and organizational culture. It is ideal for curriculum designers, administrators, researchers, policymakers, academicians, professionals, and students.




The Innovative University


Book Description

The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation , and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions. Offers new ways forward to deal with curriculum, faculty issues, enrollment, retention, graduation rates, campus facility usage, and a host of other urgent issues in higher education Discusses a strategic model to ensure economic vitality at the traditional university Contains novel insights into the kind of change that is necessary to move institutions of higher education forward in innovative ways This book uncovers how the traditional university survives by breaking with tradition, but thrives by building on what it's done best.




Alternative Universities


Book Description

Imagining the universities of the future. How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation today—MOOCs especially—focus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like. What if the university were designed around a curriculum of seven broad cognitive skills or as a series of global gap year experiences? What if, as a condition of matriculation, students had to major in three disparate subjects? What if the university placed the pursuit of play well above the acquisition and production of knowledge? By asking bold "What if?" questions, Staley assumes that the university is always in a state of becoming and that there is not one "idea of the university" to which all institutions must aspire. This book specifically addresses those engaged in university strategy—university presidents, faculty, policy experts, legislators, foundations, and entrepreneurs—those involved in what Simon Marginson calls "university making." Pairing a critique tempered to our current moment with an explanation of how change and disruption might contribute to a new "golden age" for higher education, Alternative Universities is an audacious and essential read.




Theoretical and Practical Approaches to Innovation in Higher Education


Book Description

Education badly needs effective innovations that can help produce high-quality learning outcomes across the system. The primary focus of educational innovations should be on teaching and learning theory and practice, as well as on the learner, parent, community, society, and culture. Technology applications need a solid theoretical foundation based on purposeful, systemic research, and a sound pedagogy. Theoretical and Practical Approaches to Innovation in Higher Education is an essential scholarly publication that outlines the classification of innovations, discusses the hurdles to innovation, and offers ways to increase the scale and rate of innovation-based transformations in the education system. The publication argues that raising the quality and scale of innovations in education will positively affect education itself and benefit society. Highlighting topics such as academic integrity, e-learning, and learner engagement, this book is vital for higher education professionals, academicians, educators, librarians, course designers, researchers, and students.




Technology Leadership for Innovation in Higher Education


Book Description

Higher education today faces several challenges including soaring cost, rising student debt, declining state support, and a staggering dropout rate. Digital technology enables numerous paths to innovation and promising solutions to these crises in higher education. However, few efforts have been made to look into the dynamic relationship between technology, innovation, and leadership and how they work together to transform teaching and learning, campus life, student service and support, administration, and university advancement. Technology Leadership for Innovation in Higher Education is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the intersection of technology, innovation, and leadership in higher education by examining the role of technology in activating, promoting, and accelerating innovation and by identifying challenges regarding technology leadership. While highlighting topics such as blended teaching, faculty development, and university advancement, this publication is ideally designed for teachers, principals, educational and IT management and staff, researchers, students, and stakeholders in higher education seeking current research on critical leadership dimensions required for effective education leaders.