Breaking silos and transforming organisational culture and teaching: A grass-root innovation-based community of practices across university structures

This presentation will illustrate the successful grassroots application of the Community of Practice model as an approach to dissolving faculty isolation and stimulating teaching excellence. At the Charles Darwin University, academics from a wide variety of disciplines (e.g. information technology, pharmacy, psychology, chemistry, nursing, sport science) across various schools proactively joined with learning technologists to create their own regular opportunities for professional growth in innovative teaching through the creation of the iScholar learning community. Utilizing for four approaches in synergy – community of practice, group coaching and mentoring, reflection and metacognition and self-regulated learning Ð the iScholar community has effectively contributed to creating organizational cultural change by inspiring faculty to work towards a common institutional goal, enhancing cross-discipline and cross-school collaboration, improving teaching excellence and boosting job satisfaction. iScholars are meeting fortnightly to share the latest knowledge in teaching pedagogy and methods in higher education, and are designing and implementing innovative education methods. iScholar is providing academics with a variety of spaces that emerged as critical to transform and adapt university teaching in a fast and constantly changing and increasingly diverse environment. iScholar is a secure, nurturing, inspiring and fun space for reflecting, critically exploring, discovering, building and maintaining relationships, and working together. The group is using Blackboard as their platform to collaborate, share, innovate and create innovate education methods. The work of iScholars contributes to increasing student engagement, motivation and retention.