Improving interdisciplinary online course design through action learning: a chinese case study

ABSTRACT

This case study draws a specific link to the practice of action learning (AL) in China. We organized ourselves into an AL set and used Revans’ AL, as interpreted by Marquardt (2004), to create a post-teaching dialog to examine the experience gained from delivering an interdisciplinary course online—a novice situation—in a Chinese transnational university. AL’s questioning insight occurred after conducting an evidence-based evaluation of online teaching in an interdisciplinary higher education course that used Debattista’s (2018) online teaching effectiveness rubric. The rubric offered rich ‘programed knowledge’ that triggered our question-based inquiry. We conclude that our AL approach is valuable for teacher professional development and offers our rationale for why this particular AL practice would be suitable for the Confucian culture, teaching of interdisciplinary courses, and in novice situations. By conducting AL, we identified a list of key findings, such as proactive communication among teachers in an interdisciplinary course, was vital when teaching to a large group of students. We offer recommendations to improve interdisciplinary online course design and delivery in the future based on reflections from the AL. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of this paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Action learning
• Chinese higher education
• interdisciplinary online teaching
• novice teaching situation
• teacher professional development

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Dr. Juming Shen for sharing the online post-course survey data and Dr. Edward Verlander for giving valuable feedback on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Na Li

Na Li is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Liverpool and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, an Educational Developer, and a Fellow of the Advance Higher Education. Her research interests include the virtual learning environment, technology adoption, cultural diversity in higher education, educational development, and institutional theory in higher education.

Qian Wang

Dr. Qian Wang is a Fellow of the Advance Higher Education, an Assistant Professor and Director of Research at the Academy of Future Education, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research on transnational education focuses on education leadership, teaching, and teacher education. Qian Wang is the corresponding author and can be contacted at [email protected]

Jiajun Liu

Dr. Jiajun Liu is a fellow of the Advance Higher Education and an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Future Education, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research interests include higher education teaching and learning, college student engagement and development, and campus diversity.

Victoria J. Marsick

Dr. Victoria J. Marsick is a Professor of Adult Learning and Leadership in the Department of Organization & Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on informal and incidental learning, action learning, team learning, and organizational learning in a diverse organizational setting.