Improving interdisciplinary online course design through action learning: a chinese case study

This case study draws a specific link to the practice of action learning (AL) in China. We organized ourselves into an AL set and used Revans’ AL, as interpreted by Marquardt (2004 Marquardt, Michael J. 2004. Optimising the Power of Action Learning. Palo Alto, CA: Davis-Black. [Google Scholar]), to create a post-teaching dialog to examine the experience gained from delivering an interdisciplinary course online—a novice situation—in a Chinese transnational university. AL’s questioning insight occurred after conducting an evidence-based evaluation of online teaching in an interdisciplinary higher education course that used Debattista’s (2018 Debattista, Martin. 2018. “A Comprehensive Rubric for Instructional Design in E-Learning.” The International Journal of Information and Learning Technology 35 (2): 93–104.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) online teaching effectiveness rubric. The rubric offered rich ‘programed knowledge’ that triggered our question-based inquiry. We conclude that our AL approach is valuable for teacher professional development and offers our rationale for why this particular AL practice would be suitable for the Confucian culture, teaching of interdisciplinary courses, and in novice situations. By conducting AL, we identified a list of key findings, such as proactive communication among teachers in an interdisciplinary course, was vital when teaching to a large group of students. We offer recommendations to improve interdisciplinary online course design and delivery in the future based on reflections from the AL. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of this paper.