Beyond Courses and Individuals: A Systems View of Educational Change in Higher Education
I hope you will join us for this very exciting instance of the TeLEd Monthly Event Series. This month’s event will feature Dario Blumenschein, who is a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth Science at the University of Bergen. Dario’s research has been connected to the same course redesign work that earlier TeLEd speakers, Isabela Darcie (August 2024) and Bjarte Hannisdal (October 2024), spoke on earlier. Dario’s work takes a systems approach to find better ways for making educational change.
Efforts to improve teaching often focus on individual courses or teachers, but higher education operates through complex relational and structural interdependencies. Is who we talk to as important as what we teach? By integrating research on social networks in educational change with the development of the Cosmos project for design and analysis across multiple levels of the curriculum, this talk will discuss new ways of examining course and programme alignment and pathways of change. We will explore how such approaches can help us look beyond a single course and support programme-level understanding to reveal hidden synergies in higher education.