Innovation Rush & Resistance to Change

A recent meeting convened by an innovation promoting body was perplexed by the low number of students who have registered on their platform. They were wondering why a university which has more than lakhs students on the roll find it difficult to enrol even 10 percentage of their students on their platform. They seemed to indirectly, very gently, unspokenly, blame the coordinators and institutional leadership for this state of affairs. They wanted the number to be of a higher proportion. As usual the meeting came to an end with, reportedly, all those involved taking vows to bring in more registrations on the platform so that the numbers look promising.

The question at the bottom is, where does innovation come from? Do we expect innovation to flow out of our campuses? Why do do we expect so? Can we switch innovation on the way we turn on a light? All those who wrote about creativity, lateral thinking, innovation etc have emphasised the fundamental contexts which inspire innovation. Whether it be the space and time  for playful pursuit of divergent thoughts or the dare to take risks, or the confidence to challenge the norms or the why-not mindset. How far are our campuses ripe for divergent thinking need to be explored before we decry impulsively the dearth of new ideas and unboxed thoughts. The practices and traditions which line the academic boxes rarely permit executing new thoughts or old ones in new ways. The teaching learning processes or the assessment modes hardly can be touched despite the repeated assertions otherwise. This is not a denial of the miniscule faculty members or a department here or there or even an HEI attempting transformative learning experiences, but a call to celebrate those! 

Our campuses are rarely open to the blue skies thinking mode. An interesting book by Brian Rosenberg by the title, 'Whatever it is, I'm Against it', makes a fervent plea for transformative change in Higher Education. Though written against the US Higher Education backdrop, the author who has been in the leadership role for decades, recounts instances and experiences, to establish the urgent need to rethink Higher Education. Emphasising how hard it is, he also exposes the deeply entrenched biases which block any such change happening in the realm of HEIs.  The book which is lined with revealing sense of humour, is full of episodes and anecdotes which ring bells to all those who have been in leadership roles, irrespective of the country one belongs to. With AI-led challenges breathing down the neck, leaving conveniently aside all other hurdles which seem to question the very  existence of the HEIs, he pleas for change so that the whole enterprise of Higher Education will not perish. 

The African Leadership University (ALU) model conceived and established by Fred Swaniker is taken up for special discussion in the concluding chapter to indicate the transformative directions the Higher Education can take which is context specific and not a blind aping of the US or western models. Brian lists many a thought blocks on the transformation highway of HEIs: The Major-centredness, extensive menu of programmes with avoidable redundancy, the lack of connect between the outer world and the inner campus, excessive faculty-focuss are among the issues the author discusses in the Path to change. As he says, the colleges and universities need to ask, 'what problem are you as an institution trying to solve?' and the answer should not be, 'staying in business'.  

This pedagogical ossification is the prime reason why the HEIs struggle to inspire  innovation among the learners too. Let me quote Brian Rosenberg where he dwells on the obsession with lecture as the major and sometimes only method for of content delivery in HEIs: 

"Consider, for example, the lecture, “the style of teaching that has ruled universities for 600 years.” Six hundred years ago barbers were still performing surgery. Scott Freeman, a biologist at the University of Washington, traces the history of the lecture back even further to 1050, when universities were founded in western Europe and when barbers were just starting to perform surgery. The evidence that lectures are an ineffective way of teaching is both voluminous and incontrovertible— Eric Mazur, one of the pioneers of the “flipped classroom,” notes that “it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have [the] data” about its weaknesses—yet lectures in classrooms large and small, in person and over Zoom, remain not just common but very, very common. The danger 

of even the best lectures, Mazur warns, is that “they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.” An analysis of more than two hundred studies of undergraduate STEM teaching methods led to the conclusion that “approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation.” In other words, learning by doing is more effective than learning by listening. I would not go so far as to say that the lecture should suddenly vanish altogether—what would we do with all those lecture halls?—but given its centrality to higher education and the evidence that it does not work very well as a teaching method, shouldn’t this be something about which faculty are thinking and debating pretty regularly? Isn’t the topic worth at least a faculty meeting or two?

The article in Harvard Magazine from which one of the Mazur quotes is taken was published in 2012 and is entitled, rather optimistically, “Twilight of the Lecture.” More than a decade later, the sun is little closer to setting. Or as Steven Mintz, who predicted in 2013 that there would be fewer large lecture classes a decade later, wrote in 2022, “Whew, was I mistaken."

It is easy to connect the innovation urgency that the colleges around us seem to face right now, with what Brian is talking about in the book: resistance to change in Higher Education, which is also the subtitle of the book. Young Innovators Programme, Institutions Innovation Council, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Cell, they all seek to promote what the major part of the campus teaching-learning processes seem to baulk at: Transformation. 

Babu. P. K., Ph D.