Middle-Out Approaches to Reform of University Teaching and Learning: Champions striding between the top-down and bottom-up approaches
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<P>In recent years, Australian universities have been driven by a diversity of external forces, including funding cuts, massification of higher education, and changing student demographics, to reform their relationship with students and improve teaching and learning, particularly for those studying off-campus or part-time. Many universities have responded to these forces either through formal strategic plans developed top-down by executive staff or through organic developments arising from staff in a bottom-up approach. By contrast, much of Murdoch University's response has been led by a small number of staff who have middle management responsibilities and who have championed the reform of key university functions, largely in spite of current policy or accepted practice. This paper argues that the "middle-out" strategy has both a basis in change management theory and practice, and a number of strengths, including low risk, low cost, and high sustainability. Three linked examples of middle-out change management in teaching and learning at Murdoch University are described and the outcomes analyzed to demonstrate the benefits and pitfalls of this approach.</P>
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it