This chapter defines the concept of innovation in the context of higher education by discussing the implementation of a dashboard in a university English program. A dashboard is a personalized feedback tool and a common “big data” application. The challenges arising in the process of developing and implementing such innovations have seldom been explored. However, in this study, the English Language Centre of a Hong Kong university developed a dashboard called course diagnostic reports (CDR) that was piloted with over 400 students from 39 classes. This chapter reports the findings of both a questionnaire evaluating the CDR and 14 interviews that were conducted with course leaders, subject teachers, and students. Discussions of the tool revealed the complex process of innovation. It was found that, for stakeholders, innovation is a continuous process that requires compromises and that an innovation must cross a minimum usability threshold before continuing through the innovation process.
TopIntroduction
According to the Cambridge Dictionary (n.d.), innovation is the use of a new idea or method, but this simple, literal definition does not accurately represent the process of innovation, especially in the context of higher education. In fact, a wide range of literature has examined innovations or innovative teaching methodologies, and one can find an abundance of articles on successful teaching innovations and innovative teaching methodologies, such as those by Santos, Govaerts, Verbert, and Duval (2012) and Zinn and Scheuer (2007). However, the critical challenges arising during the process of innovation seem to represent an inconvenient truth: that challenges exist and that, inexplicably, they have not been extensively reported. There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon: (1) The challenges may be too insignificant to merit inclusion in a paper; and (2) even if the challenges were reported, limited information was provided.
In the world of academic literature, journals publish papers to share knowledge (Sorokina & Wang, 2018). With this intention, editors and reviewers tend to encourage authors to describe the best practices of their innovation rather than the process of innovation. For example, how a project team convinced a funding body or other stakeholders to cooperate may not be of interest to journals, which are more interested in how innovative or cutting-edge the innovation is. This may explain why there are few articles describing the process of innovation. Additionally, even when challenges in developing innovations have been reported, many of them are minor challenges that have already been overcome. Fredriksson, Jedeskog, and Plomp (2007) conducted a project on the innovative use of information and communication technology and found that, if the participating schools were already involved in other innovations, it could be challenging for them to be involved in the project of Fredriksson, Jedeskog, and Plomp (2007), as well. This could mean that some schools may not wish to prioritize the new project, which seems to be a bureaucratic or political matter. In Fredriksson and colleagues’ paper, this challenge, as an important element in the innovation process, is only briefly mentioned perhaps due to the success of other schools in the project. The reader gets no clear sense of how these liaisons with schools could be better conducted for other innovations. As has been discussed, the reported challenge is often a minor one that would not completely ruin the innovation, which explains why it is impossible to learn about challenges in the process of innovation as reported in academic papers.
The lack of knowledge about the innovation process has become a challenge to emerging fields in the academic community, especially in higher education. Innovation in higher education must go through various processes (e.g., funding and approval), and it involves a wide range of stakeholders who protect their interests in their innovations. Without proper documentation of the innovation process, it may be hard for researchers to learn how to avoid or overcome challenges in the innovation process within a bureaucratic higher education system.
The development of an innovative dashboard is a typical example that faces human-related challenges. A dashboard is described as a place for “personal informatics” (Li, Dey, & Forlizzi, 2010) that collects data and presents data about a person. A broad range of literature describes various types of learner dashboards and their successes (see Santos, Govaerts, Verbert, and Duval, 2012 and Zinn and Scheuer, 2007). However, dashboard development is a typical field in which challenges often exist but are not extensively reported. As suggested earlier, many journals are more interested in the strengths of these dashboards than in the challenges posed by such innovation processes.
This paper discusses the innovation process of a dashboard implemented in a university in Hong Kong. The paper makes an important contribution because, by discussing this innovative tool, it helps to define innovation in the landscape of higher education.