In this e-Literate post written in November 2018, I started to articulate how the Empirical Educator Project could produce a methodology of change. The basic idea is that, as with other knowledge work such as software engineering or industrial design, educational institutions have put processes in place to ensure that academics provide quality education in a time-bounded way. But it’s the wrong kind of process. It hobbles the creativity of the knowledge workers while failing to tame the uncertainty it was meant to tame.
Software engineering invented agile methodologies and industrial design invented design thinking to address this problem. These approaches have some characteristics in common. I propose that empirical education could give rise to an analogous methodology for excellence in higher education.