Start, Stop, Succeed at Digitally Enabled Teaching Transformation

Digital transformation starts when you stop doing what you used to do. It has enabled students to stop going to the bursar’s office to pay tuition bills. It has enabled professors to stop grading quizzes manually by using the learning management system autograding function. It has also enabled them to stop lecturing to students in classrooms by recording their lectures for use in online, hybrid, and other modalities.¹

These examples are only the first steps in a long journey to get the full benefits of digital transformation, because the hardest part of transforming teaching is not the technology. It’s changing a professor’s practices. Even after decades of learning science research findings that we should stop lecturing and start using interactive instructional techniques, the teaching process has barely changed in many places.²Now, rapid developments in artificial intelligence are raising profound questions about the role of the professor in the learning process. Will AI replace people in the content creation process? Instructional process? Assessment process?

Given the slow progress and complex challenges of transforming teaching, professors are sometimes viewed as the villains in this process. However, it is more helpful to recognize them as the victims in this historical teaching tragedy. Yes, professors need to transform how they teach, but before they can do that, university leaders must change the systems that shape their behavior and constrain their creativity. System components like course length, modality, “seat time” requirements, classroom scheduling, and grading requirements are so ingrained in our educational culture that we rarely question them. In addition, there are often legal constraints from government or accrediting bodies that make it impossible for an individual professor to challenge any aspect of the system.  

For example, time has been treated as a fixed commodity in our educational system in the past. Semesters, credit-hours, seat-time, and mandatory class attendance are all structural barriers to transformation created to try to measure the learning process through system inputs. An individual professor who is required to meet with students three times per week per course requirement can not easily change that systemic constraint without risking the wrath of academic leaders and legal authorities.    

However, what if we change the time measurement system so professors can stop meeting with students for a specific number of hours per week? This is what happened in the United States where the Department of Education has interpreted traditional seat-time rules to permit distance education when there is “regular and substantive interaction” between the professor and student.³ The result of this systemic change has been the growth in online education. Many countries are still rewriting their rules and regulations to enable these types of changes to the teaching process, which is why we should recognize that this is only the beginning of systemic teaching transformation.

Another way to reimagine the systems controlling the teaching process is through a lens of pedagogical productivity. Productivity, generally speaking, is defined as getting the greatest outcomes using the least inputs. In education, we can focus this discussion further by asking the question of, “What is the most effective use of a professor’s knowledge, time, and teaching resources to enable student success in learning?” In that context, this is a systems redesign challenge with multiple variables, not an individual professor’s heroic effort to redesign their course.

Making transformational changes of this magnitude requires academic leaders to embrace a systemic design approach to reimagining the teaching process. Change the course schedule. Change the classroom design. Change the instructional technology. Change the faculty development process. And, yes, change the rules and regulations that govern the system. Change everything that may be affecting student success. Without embracing this type of holistic change mindset, we will continue sacrificing pioneering professors on the pyre of poor pedagogical practices.

At Arizona State University, our academic leaders decided to embark on just such a systemic change process. They focused on redesigning our first year, general education courses in response to frustration with the persistently high student failure rates.⁴ Traditional large class lecture pedagogy had resulted in failure rates as high as 40% in some of those courses. In response, we decided to build a hybrid model where we stopped requiring professors to meet with students three times per week. Students watched lesson videos and took formative assessments online before coming to only one class per week. In class, they worked on interactive exercises in small teams. The student success rate increased in those courses, as did our pedagogical productivity. Some professors gained as many as four hours of flexible time each week by not having to go to class to teach those two days when they stopped meeting with the class.

Through our process of systemic change, we learned important lessons about how modifications in both our pedagogy and technology can help us transform the teaching process and enhance the learning experience. Those are summarized by the following observations: