TY - JOUR
T1 - Improving interdisciplinary online course design through action learning
T2 - a chinese case study
AU - Li, Na
AU - Wang, Qian
AU - Liu, Jiajun
AU - Marsick, Victoria J.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Dr. Juming Shen for sharing the online post-course survey data and Dr. Edward Verlander for giving valuable feedback on the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/1/2
Y1 - 2022/1/2
N2 - This case study draws a specific link to the practice of action learning (AL) in China. We organized ourselves into an AL set and used Revans’ AL, as interpreted by Marquardt (2004), to create a post-teaching dialog to examine the experience gained from delivering an interdisciplinary course online—a novice situation—in a Chinese transnational university. AL’s questioning insight occurred after conducting an evidence-based evaluation of online teaching in an interdisciplinary higher education course that used Debattista’s (2018) online teaching effectiveness rubric. The rubric offered rich ‘programed knowledge’ that triggered our question-based inquiry. We conclude that our AL approach is valuable for teacher professional development and offers our rationale for why this particular AL practice would be suitable for the Confucian culture, teaching of interdisciplinary courses, and in novice situations. By conducting AL, we identified a list of key findings, such as proactive communication among teachers in an interdisciplinary course, was vital when teaching to a large group of students. We offer recommendations to improve interdisciplinary online course design and delivery in the future based on reflections from the AL. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of this paper.
AB - This case study draws a specific link to the practice of action learning (AL) in China. We organized ourselves into an AL set and used Revans’ AL, as interpreted by Marquardt (2004), to create a post-teaching dialog to examine the experience gained from delivering an interdisciplinary course online—a novice situation—in a Chinese transnational university. AL’s questioning insight occurred after conducting an evidence-based evaluation of online teaching in an interdisciplinary higher education course that used Debattista’s (2018) online teaching effectiveness rubric. The rubric offered rich ‘programed knowledge’ that triggered our question-based inquiry. We conclude that our AL approach is valuable for teacher professional development and offers our rationale for why this particular AL practice would be suitable for the Confucian culture, teaching of interdisciplinary courses, and in novice situations. By conducting AL, we identified a list of key findings, such as proactive communication among teachers in an interdisciplinary course, was vital when teaching to a large group of students. We offer recommendations to improve interdisciplinary online course design and delivery in the future based on reflections from the AL. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of this paper.
KW - Action learning
KW - Chinese higher education
KW - interdisciplinary online teaching
KW - novice teaching situation
KW - teacher professional development
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119200523&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/14767333.2021.2002681
DO - 10.1080/14767333.2021.2002681
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85119200523
SN - 1476-7333
VL - 19
SP - 49
EP - 64
JO - Action Learning: Research and Practice
JF - Action Learning: Research and Practice
IS - 1
ER -