Change management

Draft

Definition

Change management refers to management methods to plan, control and implement programs of important changes.

Why changement management ?

• Most educational organizations are very conservative. An educational technologist not only has to worry about pedagogy and technology, but also about organizational issues.

Levels of intervention:

• Policy making (in particular regarding curricula issues, infrastructure services, etc.)
• The organization
• Organizational subunits and their dependencies
• External facilitators (e.g. teacher development organizations)
• Individuals (e.g. teachers).

Models

This chapter should contain a short overview on various change mangament related models, frameworks, etc. and point to other pages.

Change management procedure models

• Engeström's learning by expansion
• Bates managing technological change model

Organizational structure

• Structure is strategy (at least to a certain point). Therefore it is useful to understand how structure is related to function (and the other way round).

• See the Mintzberg taxonomy of organizational forms

Empowerment

• An important issue is how to empower teachers. In particular, to avoid a conflict between an official "empowerment" discourse and at the same time making life difficult for teachers who actually go for it ....

• See the Baruch empowerment model

Instructional design methods

According to Bottori et al. (2007 and Willis (1995), agile design methods like rapid prototyping may be more compatible when change mangement issues are at stake, since typically these methods engage all users in the full process and are meant to adapt design to emerging needs from field testing.

Links

• Change management at elearning-reviews.org (excellent summaries)

• Organization Strategy on Google Answers. (Scroll down, excellent list).

• Fre M. Beshears' Executive summary of Tony Bates Managing Technological Change (retrieved 10:48, 26 May 2006 (MEST)).

References

• Bates, A.W. (Tony) (2000), Managing Technological Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders, San Franciso: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 0-7879-4681-8. ( Tony Bates' book is one of the most influential texts in today's change management for e-learning literature.)

• Botturi, L., Cantoni, L., Lepori, B. & Tardini, S. (2007). Fast Prototyping as a Communication Catalyst for E-Learning Design. In M. Bullen & D. Janes (eds), Making the Transition to E-Learning: Strategies and Issues. Hershey, PA: Idea Group, pp. 266-283.

• Willis, J. (1995). A recursive, reflective instructional design model based on constructivist-interpretist theory. Educational Technology, 35(6), 5-23 PDF Preprint

Further reading

(these are texts that need to be sorted out)

• Kevin Crowston (????), A Taxonomy Of Organizational Dependencies and Coordination Mechanisms, [1]

• Malone, Thomas, W. ,Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee and Brian Pentland, Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes. [2]