The Innovative Teaching and Educational Technology (ITET) Fellowship: cultivating communities of practice in learning and teaching

Abstract

In this paper we describe an institutionally funded Fellowship running 2001– 2004, which seeded and cultivated new communities of practice in innovative teaching using educational technology. The literature identifies some inherent challenges in such schemes. The Fellowship was able to surface and deal with these through a team-based action research approach. Key features were the buying out of staff time for a semester and the development of discipline-based projects in a supported cross-disciplinary group. The Fellowship has been central to shifting systemic institutional blocks to educational innovation.