One of the things that drives me quite spare about higher education is the insistence that campus-wide pedagogical change is impossible, because of academic freedom or something like that. The result is that institutions cannot take serious collective steps with respect to pedagogical change, be it finding ways to increase Indigenous content, come up with coherent ways of adopting hybrid or incorporating AI in the classroom, etc. because every prof reigns over an independent kingdom of one and the number of veto points to any change is effectively infinite.

I am here to tell you that it does not need to be this way. Change can be gradual but deliberate and significant if we all just adopt the one weird trick of altering the way periodic academic reviews of programs/department are conducted. Specifically, we need to switch from a mindset of “quality assurance,” where the lens is solely with respect to the quality of delivery to a mindset of “quality enhancement,” where the lens is student learning.

Periodic reviews in Canada vary somewhat from institution to institution, but basically, they are all fairly similar. The unit carries out a “self-study” of its activities, (with what are often minimal amounts of actual evidence, particularly with respect to graduate outcomes), it invites in a couple of outsiders—either people in similar units at other institutions or colleagues in other disciplines from the same university or both—to help review the evidence, and based on said evidence, the question of  “are we delivering discipline-specific knowledge in a comprehensive way that makes us respected by our peers in the discipline?” (If you doubt me on this point, I invite you to read a few such reviews at random —Waterloo, to take one example, keeps all of its reviews in one handy place —and not to pick on this one university because they are all pretty much the same but holy cow talk about 100% curriculum, 0% pedagogy.) 

It does not have to be this way. Imagine:

• If the definition were changed from “maintaining quality” to “enhancing quality.” Not “how do we meet minimum standards” but “how can we change what we do to improve the education we deliver” (within current budgets of course, this can’t be an exercise in budget pleading, though it could be a good opportunity for each unit to outline how it would deploy additional resources, if they became available).
• If the focus of the review was not curriculum but learning. That would mean explicitly forcing reviews to engage with pedagogy and technology as well as curriculum.
• If everyone acknowledged that issues of pedagogy and technology, while having facets which are appropriately discipline-specific, are also matters of institution-wide interest and need to be dealt with simultaneously at both the institutional level and the unit level, and that the appropriate way to deal with unit-level issues is through the periodic review process.

Now, I invite you to imagine how this would work in terms of two key issues of the day.

Hybrid Education and Dealing with Growth. As I have pointed out before, most of Canada, but Alberta and British Columbia in particular, are on the cusp of a major youth boom, which is likely to send a wave of new students to institutions which are badly placed to deal with growth. Putting a greater percentage of instruction online is one way to reduce the demands on physical capacity. At the same time, student demand for online (in particular asynchronous) education is growing because they want more flexibility in their schedules. Sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Put more courses online and reduce costs?

Well, maybe. But online courses still get lousy approval ratings from students, even from that growing percentage who prefer their courses online. What is needed is a set of online course offerings in every discipline which are not only more numerous but also better. That’s not going to happen without careful planning. Each unit needs to i) think through which material is most amenable to online delivery (depending on the discipline, this may involve slicing and dicing existing course content to stuff the most appropriate material into online courses), ii) put a lot of resources into those online courses, and iii) put these in the hands the instructors with the most interest and ability in online teaching. Is this going to look the same in every discipline? Absolutely not. Which is why it makes sense to tell every unit that this is something it needs to get sorted for itself during its next review.

Artificial intelligence (or any other significant technological change). Like the introduction of the microcomputer in the 1980s and online search in the 1990s, AI is changing things at the same time. It is changing the world of work into which graduates are entering and for which higher education must prepare them, and it is changing the tools that students have to approach the academic work set by their professors. The North American higher education system to a large degree dealt with these challenges mostly by letting individual professors work out for themselves what they were going to do which was not really all that helpful (some honorable exceptions existed, like the 1996 Acadia Advantage program which—well ahead of its time—gave every student a laptop computer, briefly giving Wolfville a tech vibe which it later squandered). But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Imagine a unit review in which the unit had to i) explain what AI skills it thought students would likely need to master to succeed after graduation, ii) which of these skills it could develop through changing pedagogy and assessment, and iii) what opportunities existed to use AI to improve pedagogy and learning experiences in the core discipline. The second and third of these would be impossible and indeed inappropriate to do at the institutional level; it is the unit that is best placed to do this. It’s just that no one thinks to ask them.

Anyways, you get the idea. There are lots of pedagogically related areas in which institutions desperately need to effect change, but the effective unit of change/analysis is the program or department. And yet at most institutions, there is no way to link these two levels. And so people shrug their shoulders and say, “nothing is ever going to change.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Just change some rules and put some new responsibility and life into a process that is often moribund. It won’t stop the problem of vetoes by the odd cranky faculty member; rather, it will just re-direct the crankiness (a fair criticism of my proposal is that it will make the job of departmental chair even less appealing than it already is). That said, most units’ baseline level of crank is probably not high enough to paralyze a process like this, so outside of a few pockets, there will be visible progress, which is more than you can say right now.

To be clear, the process won’t be quick or even. Periodic reviews are not fast, and as the name suggests, they are only periodic. It would take 5-10 years for every unit or program to go through this process once. But that’s maybe appropriate, too: the experiences of the first units through these processes can inform future work and encourage a sense of different parts of the university learning from one another (we are supposed to be learning organizations, aren’t we?). It will be lumpy and imperfect.

But then, progress always is.