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The committee's largest sponsors include GE, Merrill Lynch and Company, IBM, McKinsey and Company, General Motors, and Pfizer.

The Change Process as Problem Solving and Problem Finding

What is not useful about this framework is that it does not allow for change efforts that begin with the organization in extremis

this framework is that it gives rise to thinking about a staged approach to changing things.

Change as a “How” Problem

Change as a “What” Problem

Change as a “Why” Problem

The Approach taken to Change Management Mirrors Management's Mindset

People in core units, buffered as they are from environmental turbulence and with a history of relying on adherence to standardized procedures, typically focus on “how” questions.

To summarize: Problems may be formulated in terms of “how,” “what” and “why” questions. Which formulation is used depends on where in the organization the person posing the question or formulating the problem is situated, and where the organization is situated in its own life cycle. “How” questions tend to cluster in core units. “What” questions tend to cluster in buffer units. People in perimeter units tend to ask “what” and “how” questions. “Why” questions are typically the responsibility of top management.

One More Time: How do you manage change? The honest answer is that you manage it pretty much the same way you’d manage anything else of a turbulent, messy, chaotic nature, that is, you don’t really manage it, you grapple with it. It’s more a matter of leadership ability than management skill. The first thing to do is jump in. You can’t do anything about it from the outside. A clear sense of mission or purpose is essential. The simpler the mission statement the better. “Kick ass in the marketplace” is a whole lot more meaningful than “Respond to market needs with a range of products and services that have been carefully designed and developed to compare so favorably in our customers’ eyes with the products and services offered by our competitors that the majority of buying decisions will be made in our favor.” Build a team. “Lone wolves” have their uses, but managing change isn’t one of them. On the other hand, the right kind of lone wolf makes an excellent temporary team leader. Maintain a flat organizational team structure and rely on minimal and informal reporting requirements. Pick people with relevant skills and high energy levels. You’ll need both. Toss out the rulebook. Change, by definition, calls for a configured response, not adherence to prefigured routines. Shift to an action-feedback model. Plan and act in short intervals. Do your analysis on the fly. No lengthy up-front studies, please. Remember the hare and the tortoise. Set flexible priorities. You must have the ability to drop what you’re doing and tend to something more important. Treat everything as a temporary measure. Don’t “lock in” until the last minute, and then insist on the right to change your mind. Ask for volunteers. You’ll be surprised at who shows up. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by what they can do. Find a good “straw boss” or team leader and stay out of his or her way. Give the team members whatever they ask for — except authority. They’ll generally ask only for what they really need in the way of resources. If they start asking for authority, that’s a signal they’re headed toward some kind of power-based confrontation and that spells trouble. Nip it in the bud! Concentrate dispersed knowledge. Start and maintain an issues logbook. Let anyone go anywhere and talk to anyone about anything. Keep the communications barriers low, widely spaced, and easily hurdled. Initially, if things look chaotic, relax — they are. Remember, the task of change management is to bring order to a messy situation, not pretend that it’s already well organized and disciplined.

Toulmin rejected the abstract syllogistic logic, meant to produce absolute standards for proving propositions true, that had become fashionable in analytic philosophy. Instead he argued (in the spirit of Wittgenstein) that philosophers must monitor how people actually argue if the philosophers' observations about persuasion are to make any sense. Toulmin took jurisprudential reasoning as his chief example in The Uses of Argument, but he believed that some aspects of a good argument depend on the field in which they're presented, while others are "field invariant."

Toulmin's "central thesis is that every sort of argumentation can in principle claim rationality and that the criteria to be applied when determining the soundness of the argumentation depend on the nature of the problems to which the argumentation relates."

But Toulmin, trained in the hard sciences and mathematics himself, saw through the science worship of less-credentialed sorts. He didn't relent, announcing "our need to reappropriate the wisdom of the 16th-century humanists, and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th-century 'new philosophy' with a practical concern for human life in its concrete detail."

Toulmin declared its upshot: "From now on, permanent validity must be set aside as illusory, and our idea of rationality related to specific functions of ... human reason. ... For me personally, the outcome of 40 years of philosophical critique was thus a new vision of—so to speak—the rhetoric of philosophy."

But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.

Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college

W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.

I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism

Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.

The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of

Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.

Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.

Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians

good teaching takes time

On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)

The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.

until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.

our award criteria: 1) articulation and evidence of outcomes; 2) success with regard to outcomes; 3) information to the public about outcomes; and 4) use of outcomes for educational improvement.

In addition to Capella University, Portland State University (OR), St. Olaf College (MN) and the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith (AR) also will receive the 2010 CHEA Award. The award will be presented at the 2010 CHEA Annual Conference, which will be held January 25-28 in Washington, D.C

year we strug

year we strug

those who control influential rating systems of the sort published by U.S. News & World Report -- define academic quality as small classes taught by distinguished faculty, grand campuses with impressive libraries and laboratories, and bright students heavily recruited. Since all of these indicators of quality are costly, my college’s pursuit of quality, like that of so many others, led us to seek more revenue to spend on quality improvements. And the strategy worked.

Based on those concerns, and informed by the literature on the “teaching to learning” paradigm shift, we began to change our focus from what we were teaching to what and how our students were learning.

No one wants to cut costs if their reputation for quality will suffer, yet no one wants to fall off the cliff.

When quality is defined by those things that require substantial resources, efforts to reduce costs are doomed to failure

some of the best thinkers in higher education have urged us to define the quality in terms of student outcomes.

Faculty said they wanted to move away from giving lectures and then having students parrot the information back to them on tests. They said they were tired of complaining that students couldn’t write well or think critically, but not having the time to address those problems because there was so much material to cover. And they were concerned when they read that employers had reported in national surveys that, while graduates knew a lot about the subjects they studied, they didn’t know how to apply what they had learned to practical problems or work in teams or with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Our applications have doubled over the last decade and now, for the first time in our 134-year history, we receive the majority of our applications from out-of-state students.

We established what we call college-wide learning goals that focus on "essential" skills and attributes that are critical for success in our increasingly complex world. These include critical and analytical thinking, creativity, writing and other communication skills, leadership, collaboration and teamwork, and global consciousness, social responsibility and ethical awareness.

despite claims to the contrary, many of the factors that drive up costs add little value. Research conducted by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman found that “there is no consistent relationship between spending and performance, whether that is measured by spending against degree production, measures of student engagement, evidence of high impact practices, students’ satisfaction with their education, or future earnings.” Indeed, they concluded that “the absolute level of resources is less important than the way those resources are used.”

After more than a year, the group had developed what we now describe as a low-residency, project- and competency-based program. Here students don’t take courses or earn grades. The requirements for the degree are for students to complete a series of projects, captured in an electronic portfolio,

students must acquire and apply specific competencies

Faculty spend their time coaching students, providing them with feedback on their projects and running two-day residencies that bring students to campus periodically to learn through intensive face-to-face interaction

At the very least, finding innovative ways to lower costs without compromising student learning is wise competitive positioning for an uncertain future

As the campus learns more about the demonstration project, other faculty are expressing interest in applying its design principles to courses and degree programs in their fields. They created a Learning Coalition as a forum to explore different ways to capitalize on the potential of the learning paradigm.

a problem-based general education curriculum

After a year and a half, the evidence suggests that students are learning as much as, if not more than, those enrolled in our traditional business program

We do not have any contact with your students. Instructors retain full control of the process, from designing the assignments in the first place, to specifying learning outcomes and attaching weights to each outcome. Instructors also review the work of our TAs through a step called the Interim Check, which happens after 10% of the assignments have been completed. Faculty provide feedback, offer any further instructions and eventually sign-off on the work done, before our TAs continue with the remainder of the assignments

Finally, upon the request of the instructor, the weights he/she specified to the learning outcomes will be rubric-based scores which are used to generate a composite score for each student assignment

As an added bonus, our Virtual-TAs provide a detailed, summative report for the instructor on the overall class performance on the given assignment, which includes a look at how the class fared on each outcome, where the students did well, where they stumbled and what concepts, if any, need reinforcing in class the following week.

We can also, upon request, generate reports by Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). This report can be used by the instructor to immediately address gaps in learning at the individual or classroom level.

Think of this as a micro-closing-of-the-loop that happens each week.  Contrast this with the broader, closing-the-loop that accompanies program-level assessment of learning, which might happen at the end of a whole academic year or later!

(say... 3-5 other participants are willing to sign off on your participation)

Evidence of contribution on course projects

I think for those that are looking for PD credit we should be able to use the proposed assessment model (once you guys make it better) for accreditation. You would end up with an email that said "i was assessed based on this model and was not found wanting" signed by facilitators (or other participants, as surely given the quality of the participants i've seen, they would qualify as people who could guarantee such a thing).

I think the Otago model would work well here. I call it the Otago model as Leigh Blackall's course at Otago was the first time i actually heard of someone doing it. In this model you do all the work in a given course, and then are assessed for credit AFTER the course by, essentially, challenging for PLAR. It's a nice distributed model, as it allows different people to get different credit for the same course.

The IDEA Center, an education research group based at Kansas State University, has been spreading its particular course-evaluation gospel since 1975. The central innovation of the IDEA system is that departments can tailor their evaluation forms to emphasize whichever learning objectives are most important in their discipline.

(Roughly 350 colleges use the IDEA Center's system, though in some cases only a single department or academic unit participates.)

The new North Texas instrument that came from these efforts tries to correct for biases that are beyond an instructor's control. The questionnaire asks students, for example, whether the classroom had an appropriate size and layout for the course. If students were unhappy with the classroom, and if it appears that their unhappiness inappropriately colored their evaluations of the instructor, the system can adjust the instructor's scores accordingly.

Elaine Seymour, who was then director of ethnography and evaluation research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was assisting with a National Science Foundation project to improve the quality of science instruction at the college level. She found that many instructors were reluctant to try new teaching techniques because they feared their course-evaluation ratings might decline.

"So the ability to do some quantitative analysis of these comments really allows you to take a more nuanced and effective look at what these students are really saying."

Mr. Frick and his colleagues found that his new course-evaluation form was strongly correlated with both students' and instructors' own measures of how well the students had mastered each course's learning goals.

The survey instrument, known as SALG, for Student Assessment of their Learning Gains, is now used by instructors across the country. The project's Web site contains more than 900 templates, mostly for courses in the sciences.

"Students are the inventory," Mr. Crumbley says. "The real stakeholders in higher education are employers, society, the people who hire our graduates. But what we do is ask the inventory if a professor is good or bad. At General Motors," he says, "you don't ask the cars which factory workers are good at their jobs. You check the cars for defects, you ask the drivers, and that's how you know how the workers are doing."

William H. Pallett, president of the IDEA Center, says that when course rating surveys are well-designed and instructors make clear that they care about them, students will answer honestly and thoughtfully.

In Mr. Bain's view, student evaluations should be just one of several tools colleges use to assess teaching. Peers should regularly visit one another's classrooms, he argues. And professors should develop "teaching portfolios" that demonstrate their ability to do the kinds of instruction that are most important in their particular disciplines. "It's kind of ironic that we grab onto something that seems fixed and fast and absolute, rather than something that seems a little bit messy," he says. "Making decisions about the ability of someone to cultivate someone else's learning is inherently a messy process. It can't be reduced to a formula."

"The evaluation part is critical. No matter which process we used, whether it was the [team] or hybrid model, they all did significantly worse than we hoped [in the evaluation stage]," Terwiesch says. "It's no good generating a great idea if you don't recognize the idea as great. It's like me sitting here and saying I had the idea for Amazon. If I had the idea but didn't do anything about it, then it really doesn't matter that I had the idea."

He says an online system that creates a virtual "suggestion box" can accomplish the same goal as long as it is established to achieve a particular purpose.

Imposing structure doesn't replace or stifle the creativity of employees, Ulrich adds. In fact, the goal is to establish an idea generation process that helps to bring out the best in people. "We have found that, in the early phases of idea generation, providing very specific process guideposts for individuals [such as] 'Generate at least 10 ideas and submit them by Wednesday,' ensures that all members of a team contribute and that they devote sufficient creative energy to the problem."

The results of the experiment with the students showed that average quality of the ideas generated by the hybrid process were better than those that came from the team process by the equivalent of roughly 30 percentage points.

in about three times more ideas than the traditional method.

"We find huge differences in people's levels of creativity, and we just have to face it. We're not all good singers and we're not all good runners, so why should we expect that we all are good idea generators?

They found that ideas built around other ideas are not statistically better than any random suggestion.

"In innovation, variance is your friend. You want wacky stuff because you can afford to reject it if you don't like it. If you build on group norms, the group kills variance."