I will be speaking at the Third International Conference on Lean Six Sigma for Higher Education at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 8-9 June 2015. This is going to be a great conference with lots of great speakers. Learn from their experiences and share your own by submitting a paper and by attending the conference.
The tile and description of my keynote talk is below.
Application of Lean to Teaching Lean principles and practices have been applied to higher education in recent years, but almost exclusively to improve administrative processes. This talk will describe how Lean has been applied to improve an academic process, teaching, over a 15 year period. Benefits for students include more focused course content, clearer expectations, unambiguous learning outcomes, greater ability to focus on learning, and more timely feedback. Benefits for professors include better course design and organization, fewer teaching errors, improved student engagement, focused assignments, and simplified grading. Student evaluation data show that professors can achieve a 0.5 to 1.5 point increase in student evaluation scores for overall excellence of course and instructor using the Lean teaching pedagogy.
I will also be delivering a workshop on Lean teaching where I will share the specific methods that I have used in developing the Lean teaching pedagogy. We can have a great dialog together with professors from around the world. I hope to see you there!