Organizational Design of Innovative Education - Insights from a Combined Design and Action Research Project

This research aims to contribute to an emerging area of organizational design research, focusing on educational innovation. Our contribution comes in a form of an innovative organizational design solution for on-campus large lecture instruction, here named the Team Net Based Learning (TNBL) model, designed by the author and later independently adopted by other educators. The paper reports on a combined design and action research project of initiating, designing, implementing and evaluating the TNBL model (design research artifact), over a period of two years in a real-life setting, from a standpoint of a reflective practitioner/designer, engaged in action research in the context of her own practice. The model continues to be used to this day. Even though this project was implemented in the information systems domain, the main design artifact is discipline-and content-agnostic, and as such could be used in any other discipline. The outcomes of this research further strengthen the argument previously made by organization studies researchers that scholars researching organization systems and processes can use their knowledge and experience to organise and manage student activities.