Program Redesign:

The Respiratory Therapy program redesign continues to be a learning experience for me and I suspect for all the Faculty. What I have learned is that a highly motivated and enthusiastic group can go astray on large complex projects even when all those involved have the best of intentions.

I suspect that the biggest contributing factor was individuals became entrenched with their vision and selective in their evidence to support that vision. This was enhanced by senior management that did not involve themselves and only retained a superficial distant understanding of what was being, brought forward in the design. "The devil is in the details" is an apt quote for this redesign failure.

In my opinion SAIT is not a particularly innovative organization and this often works to their advantage. Knowing what you do and doing it well has been and is a good driving principle and has worked well for SAIT.  So this then leads to my major concern with the redesign. Why would we build a totally unique untried educational model designed and implement by individuals with no educational design expertise? A model built basically on a few individuals personal though limited view of educational concepts with large amounts of imagination. Unique and creative  but conceptually weak and in my opinion flawed. The largest assumptions that the redesign seem to be based on are incorrect. In my opinion these are, that learns will have better understanding and success in a totally integrated course design, that our Learners will be successful with a major part of their learning done as self-directed, and that a major focus of the in-class work should be on soft "professionalism" concepts. In my opinion their is no evidence to support these assertions and like many involved I was bullied by my lack of time and energy to find evidence to refute these concepts. My only evidence that I can easily put forward are the many successful programs at SAIT and other institutions that have more standard design models.

I would like to refute the claim that I am not progressive in my concepts in educational design by pointing out that this redesign is not based on progressive use of technology or educational concepts such as problem based learning or even integrated simulation and lab design.  Both of these elements are limited and reduced in effectiveness in this design so how did we get here? This is a very important question for managers and administrators to ask themselves.

I have my opinions but there have been far to many opinions and we'll meaning speculations already in this project. What we need are rationale approaches based on evidence and informed group concensus. "Too late for that" is an excuse that will plague the Respiratory Program for many years. "Evidenced based" is a concept that many of us discuss but in this case have not implemented.