Resumen de Conceptualizing interactions between innovation characteristics and organizational members’readiness to adopt educational innovations
David M. Bourrie, Chetan S. Sankar, L. Allison Jones-Farmer
Although substantial funding has been expended to develop new educational innovations, especially in engineering, fewhave found widespread acceptance in the classroom. Little is known regarding the interactions among the variables thatinfluence successful dissemination and adoption. This research proposes a framework to show the interactions betweeninnovation characteristics and the readiness of an educational organizations’ faculty members, administration, andstudents to become aware, intend to adopt, adopt, and use educational innovations. One hundred eighty seven engineeringeducation papers published during 2007–2012 were analyzed to identify the characteristics of educational innovations thatinfluence their eventual dissemination. The researchers analyzed a sample of these articles (37) and synthesized the resultsto develop a framework. Interrater reliability among the researchers was 0.86. The proposed framework describes theinteraction between characteristics of an educational innovation and an organizations’ readiness to disseminate and adoptan innovation. The framework is then illustrated with examples. This framework provides a mechanism to link theoutcomes, interventions, and context where the outcomes are the successful dissemination and adoption of educationalinnovations, the interventions are the characteristics of the innovation, and the context is the organizational readiness(readiness of faculty members, administrators, and students to adopt the innovation). For widespread dissemination andadoption to occur, educational innovators must incorporate positive characteristics in the innovations and implementthem in organizations that are ready for such change.
