Case Study: Faculty Professional Development Workshops For Innovation Diffusion

Part of computer science education research focuses on the design of new technologies and techniques for improving educational experiences. However, for these systems and techniques to be truly impactful, their use must be disseminated to the larger instructor population. Single-instance workshops, where instructors are brought together to learn about a new technique or system so that they can possibly adopt it, are a common dissemination method. Unfortunately, rarely do we see reports regarding their effectiveness. In this case study, we report on two NSF-funded single-instance workshops designed to support adoption of the Ubiquitous Presenter (UP) active learning classroom presentation system. Though only 44% of workshop attendees used the system in their classrooms, 65% of those used the system repeatedly. Overall this impacted 1570 students. Additionally, 60% of our attendees used the active learning features of UP a much higher usage rate than in the general UP user population. We reflect on the aspects of the workshops which seemed to promote, and hinder, instructor adoption and, finally, suggest some metrics for evaluating innovation dissemination workshops in general.