Active Learning and Technology: Designing Change for Faculty, Students, and Institutions
Much of the rhetoric about contemporary higher education suggests that colleges and universities need to embrace change due to advances in knowledge, technology, transportation, and more—advances that have dramatically shifted the way we all function in the modern world. But what manner of change for learning itself do the public narratives suggest? Commission reports, report cards, and public agenda profiles of U.S. requirements for higher education seem to be asking for substantive change. Many years ago, Chris Argyris and Donald Schön described such transformational shifts as double-loop learning, the kind that ultimately brings about changes in an institution’s structure and processes.1 Double-loop learning is quite different from its single-loop cousin, which often looks like piecemeal changes on the margins of institutional behavior, the isolated shifts in rules or regulations of an institution. Both single- and double-loop learning can be parts of a substantive change process.
