The Change Management Guide to Incorporating Educational Technology is intended to help instructors incorporate educational technology into their specific teaching contexts. The focus of this guide is not technical, but cultural and organizational, meant to support educators at a variety of experience levels. It is designed to be technology-agnostic in order to help instructors grapple with the context and implications of their technology usage rather than the specifics of utilizing a particular tool. The generalized principles offered in this guide can be flexibly applied to account for a wide spectrum of contexts and to ensure that the implementation of technology is truly a benefit to learning.
This guide addresses one of the persistent weaknesses in the Learning Technologies (LT) space: successful, long-term integration of technology into the classroom. These failed implementations create fatigue and worsened outcomes for both instructors and students. However, by incorporating strategies already developed by Organization Development (OD) researchers to help manage organizational change, instructors can utilize more lasting and more successful teaching practices around technology.
Designed for instructors working within the higher education space, this guide has a specific focus on those actively teaching undergraduate-level courses. It is, however, technology-agnostic and discipline-agnostic, intended to be of use in addressing contextual factors that are relevant to all higher education teaching situations. It should be applicable to instructors teaching in-person, completely online, and in a variety of hybrid formats.
While the guide draws on thorough research, that research informs rather than suffuses the guide. Citations will be minimally provided where appropriate, but in the interest of creating a positive and expedient user experience, the guide primarily concerns itself with practicalities. For a more in-depth exploration of the research underpinning this work, see the Appendix.
The design of this guide is modular, written to serve as both a step-by-step guide, moving through key factors in implementation, as well as a quick reference document that can be picked up mid-stream. It is organized according to the stages of implementation: planning, introducing, utilizing, validating, reflecting. However, not all instructors have the support, the time, or the authority to be involved in all of the presented stages and an instructor may be in any stage, and with any number of degrees of influence over the process.