Improving Instruction in Universities: A Case Study of the Ontario Universities Program for Instructional Development (OUPID)

Mei-Fei Elrick

Abstract

In the late I960's and 1970's, universities established programs, projects, and offices to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching. One of these, the Ontario Universities Program for Instructional Development (OUPID), was created to develop teaching in Ontario's 16 universities. It employed two methods, individual grants and institutional grants, to fulfill its mandate. The Program's limited impact on teaching was attributed to the amount of money, $2,500,000 earmarked for OUPID during its seven years of operation (1973-80) and to the lack of a plan. When examined closely, these reasons only partially explain OUPID's limited influence on teaching. It is more illuminating to consider the Program in relation to what most academics and universities value. This reveals that OUPID's methods neither reflected the way academics view good teaching and teaching improvement nor the way the universities believe excellence is fostered. These findings suggest that interventions which seek to change university teaching must agree with and then extend academic and university values. This conclusion has implications for the response universities make as they address the recent concern for the quality of undergraduate education.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Published

1990-08-31



Section

Articles



License

Copyright in the article is vested with the Author under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).


How to Cite

Elrick, M.-F. (1990). Improving Instruction in Universities: A Case Study of the Ontario Universities Program for Instructional Development (OUPID). Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 20(2), 61–79. https://doi.org/10.47678/cjhe.v20i2.183074