Risks and Innovation

It’s been a while since I posted here – and honestly, looking back on all the writing I used to do, it’s clear I used to enjoy it. Reflecting on work and research and education has always been something I’ve liked doing, so here goes for 2025!

The last few years have been challening to say the least. We all lived through COVID, but my teaching and research journey has honestly taken a step backwards. I currently work in a place that is quite behind in its management and implementation of learning technology, which makes me miss my old colleagues at UBC, and even the leadership that drove the amazing things they were doing. Having worked in multiple countries and how this being my 8th educational institution I’ve worked at, the perspective and differences between all thees places comes to the fore. The size and scope of a university definitely matters, but I’ve also worked at smaller universities who had great people in place to support innovation. Where I currently work, I honestly don’t know what group or what person that is.

Work culture, willingness to try new things, expert leadership and many other factors play a role in innovation and digital teaching and learning, and these can shape teacher adoption, teacher awareness and even in the end, the student experience.

I’ve learned lots in the last few years, and after a quick conversation with one of my mentors this morning, I’ve come to revisit the concept of RISK and the role it plays in higher education, or even education in general. It requires risk to innovate, to try new things to learn and fail, and having processes in place to allow risks to be taken, and to learn from them if a project is a complese success or an unmitigated failure is important in education. We do it as teachers. We do it as learners. Those who support both parties should also be taking risks, or at least supporting an environment where teachers and learners can take risks and try things. When the pace of change is slow, when there is so much avoidance of risk in those who support teaching and learning from the technology side, well time reverses. If the technologies feel old, then the related pedagogies feel old too because you can’t do as much with old technology.

With that being said, there are many forms of risk at play – risk with regards to financial investment in newer, potentially more expensive tools is a huge factor. But considering newer tools may in face relieve financial stresses in other areas in the longer term is part of the decision-making process. For example, selecting an LMS (Learning Management System) that is over 20 years old at its core requires lots of work in terms of integration with other systems because it may not operate the way that most progressive web apps do (the backbone of the modern web), so much more work needs to be done to integrate it. This is just one factor at play, so it’s important when thinking of risk from an edtech leadership perspective, that there is both a short and long term strategy, as well as clear visioning around what the next 2,5, 10 or 20 years should look like.