TLC series: Analysis of Teaching and Learning Centres by the eLinC. The HITS classification through the lens of MIT

The eLinC monitors and analyses educational trends and innovation with a focus on good practices, both internal and external, to help improve the UOC’s educational model. José López Ruiz and Desirée Gómez Cardosa, from the Teaching and Learning Analysis team, have recently carried out an analysis of the types of centre responsible for promoting educational innovation in universities and their specific features, and have reviewed the HITS classification.

An analysis of teaching and learning centres

A Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) is a central and dedicated space where ongoing excellence and support in teaching and learning are the primary focus, staffed by professionals with expertise in pedagogy, teaching innovation and student learning (Wright, 2023)^[1][2]. In many ways, TLCs help to shape the professional and academic culture and teaching practices in their institutions (Atkins et al., 2017).

Bodies like TLCs are responsible for promoting, implementing and ensuring the sustainability of educational innovation aimed at improving the quality of teaching and learning in higher education institutions. Educational innovation is a “planned and deliberate” action (UNESCO, 2016), involving multiple experts and teams, which can adopt different approaches and forms of management depending on the degree of maturity and the strategic vision shared by each institution.

The eLinC, as the UOC’s TLC, regularly monitors its ecosystem to identify educational and innovation trends in the field of e-learning to analyse successful practices that improve educational models. This blog reviews and reflects on many of these teaching trends and innovations. The centre’s team of analysts has recently compiled a report containing a sample of experiences and good institutional practices to promote and manage teaching innovation in other universities and TLCs with links to the eLinC.

The review of TLCs focused on innovation and improvement in teaching and learning, analysing the role of the centres and how they work to support this process as part of their institutional strategy, using the HITS classification developed by Wright (2023). The results of the analysis are summarized in a series of insights and reflections that will be shared in a series of blog posts we hope will be of interest to readers. For the analysts it was a most interesting exercise, giving them the opportunity to see how their model is reflected in other parts of the world. The analysis allowed them to understand which practices, forms of organization and service structures are similar to or differ from those found in other settings.

HITS classification

As noted earlier, there are a wide range of models for teaching and learning centres and the particular ways they operate. Stump and Sastry (2023), from the Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, highlight Wright’s (2023) classification of centres, where teaching and learning models represent the centre’s theory of change and show how change occurs most successfully in their particular institutional context. Wright classifies these theories of change using the acronym HITS, where each centre corresponds to one of the letters:

• H is for hub; they connect and coordinate all teaching and learning activities at the institution, striving to promote dialogue and cooperation, and offering centralized programmes and resources.
  • Most common activities: programmes for small groups (courses or workshops), events throughout the institution and communities of practice, dialogue or cooperation.
• I is for incubator; they support new ideas and the teaching staff’s development.
  • Most common activities: individual consultation, monitoring the teaching staff, guidance for new teaching staff, grants for teaching and training.
• T is for temple; they are designed to raise the value of teaching and learning and promote educational development. Temple strategies provide public acknowledgement of good teaching and efforts to create change within an institution.
  • Most common activities: awards for teaching, innovation, teaching with technology, guidance and tutoring, and acknowledgement from students, such as faculty appreciation week.
• S is for sieve ; they use a strategy to filter and promote only the best research-backed practices. This approach emphasizes evidence-based standards, experience and practice.
  • Most common activities: support for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), research, participation in quality processes through the development of standards, and participation by students in course assessment.

As Wright’s work demonstrates, most teaching and learning centres fit in one or more of the categories described above, and many use strategies from multiple categories.

Recommendations on how to develop or strengthen teaching and learning centres

Stump and Sastry asked TLC directors and staff who use the Center for Teaching and Learning Matrix^[3] for advice and brought their comments together in the following key strategies:

1. Know and understand the culture of your institution. Know how to gain leverage in your institution and respond to this instead of fighting against it.
2. Be present; get to know the teaching staff and personnel. The only way for centres to grow is to offer products that serve teaching staff and to make an effort to ensure the lab responds to what they want. Design a lab that responds to real needs; avoid creating the sensation that something is being imposed on them. To gain the trust of teaching staff, start by meeting a small need.
3. Have a clear engagement model. Emphasize a flagship programme that you can advocate and devote resources to; make sure you evaluate it and can demonstrate its impact.
4. Raise awareness of the work carried out by the centre. An important part of the work that a centre has to do is to raise its profile, making it clear that there are resources for teaching. Combine that with a substantive programme so you can say: “we’ve done this, a lot of teachers have participated and that’s how we’ve measured our success”.
5. Recruit teaching staff development champions. Bring teaching staff who are doing great things to the fore, rather than positioning yourself as someone who tells them what to do. Find powerful people who are also good teachers and care about teaching; showcase their work. The most important thing a centre can have is the respect of the teaching staff. It’s about creating relationships with people where they feel they’ve contributed to what you do.
6. Create a space and culture where teaching staff can talk to each other about teaching. Instead of holding one workshop after another, offer more substantial interaction, such as learning communities that bring teaching staff together. Raise awareness of the centre, as a place that creates a sense of community among teaching staff.
7. Seek institutional leadership support. A relationship with the management of the institution can make a teaching and learning centre an integral part of the institution. Make sure administrators recognize their contribution to the work of teaching staff.
8. Emphasize services for all teaching staff. Be sure to include programmes and services designed for teaching staff at all levels of their careers.
9. Use evidence as the basis for all programmes. Incorporate evidence into programmes. Summaries or reviews of evidence that support new strategies or techniques are important. While executing the programme, evaluate it, present evidence of your success and apply for more funding. Build parts of a programme so you don’t have to ask for all the resources at once. Try things, prove their impact, and then build something sustainable.

Conclusions

Benchmarking serves both for inspiration and as a reference point for reviewing our own practices. By studying different centres with functionalities similar to those of the eLinC, we have been able to detect practices that offer similar services with different approaches. Both Wright’s HITS classification and the analysis by Stump and Sastry serve to frame the structure of centres, and to assess the type that best meets the needs of the institution. When studying the question, we have been able to see that many teaching and learning centres have evolved over time with a majority coming to hybridize different formats, although many of them still focus on offering only some of the features of HITS. The prominent role played by many TLCs during the Covid transition stages in supporting the definition and implementation of technical and pedagogical strategies for remote teaching has also become clear – a role and connection that are becoming increasingly important for institutions as the digital transformation of education accelerates.

In future posts, we’ll look more closely at how the different centres are structured and what their best practices are in different areas for improving teaching and learning.

^[1] Wright takes this definition from the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning, Washington and Lee University, Virginia, USA.

^[2] Wright, M. C. (2023). Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education. JHU Press.

^[3] More information in A Center for Teaching and Learning Matrix.  

Bibliography

Atkins, B., Koroluk, J. & Stranach, M. (2017). Canadian Teaching and Learning Centres on Facebook and Twitter: An Exploration Through Social Media. TechTrends 61, pp. 253–262. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0144-2

Stump, G.S. & Sastry, A. (2023). Teaching and Learning Centers: A pathway to sustainable teaching innovations. MIT J-WEL.

UNESCO Peru. (2016). Innovación educativa. Herramientas de apoyo para el trabajo docente. UNESCO. https://uai.edu.ar/media/117274/art-unesco-innovacioneseducativas-e-metodologc3ada-4-innov-educ.pdf

Wright, M.C. (2023). Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education. (p. 9). Johns Hopkins University Press.