Mark Twain almost certainly said:
“substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them”
and he is also attributed with saying:
“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds”
Both takes, perhaps even while being a little contradictory, relate to the idea of innovation. In this post that I initially drafted in an interaction with GPT Pro Advance voice chat while walking to work, I have thrown down some things that have been bothering me a bit about this surprisingly controversial word.
Firstly, what counts as innovation in education? You often hear folk argue that, for example, audio feedback is no innovation as teachers somewhere or other have been doing it for donkeys years. The more I think though, the more I’m certain actions/ interventions/ experiments/ adaptations are rarely innovative by themselves but what matters fundamentally is context. Something that’s been around for years in one field or department might be utterly new and transformative somewhere else.
Objective Structured Clinical Examinations are something I have been thinking about a lot because I believe they may inspire others to adapt this assessment approach outside health professions. . In medical education, they’re routine. In business or political economy observable stations to assess performance or professional judgement would probably be deemed innovative. Chatting with colleagues, they could instantly see how something like that might work in their own context, but with different content, different criteria and perhaps a different ethos. In other words, in terms of the thing we might try to show we are doing to evidence the probably impossible to achieve ‘continuous improvement’ agenda, innovation isn’t about something being objectively new; it’s about it being new here. It’s about context, relevance and reapplication.
Innovation isn’t (just) what’s shiny
Ages ago I wrote about the danger and tendency for educators (and their leaders) to be dazzled by shiny things. But we need to move away from equating innovation with digital novelty. The current obsession is AI, unsurprisingly, but it’s easy to get swept along in the sheen of it, especially if, like me, you are a vendor target. This, though reminds me that there’s a tendency to see innovation as synonymous with technological disruption. But I’d argue the more interesting innovations right now are not just about what AI can do, but how people are responding to it.
Arguable I know, but I do believe AI offers clear affordances: supporting diverse staff and student bodies, support for feedback, marking assistance, rewriting for tone, generating examples or case studies. And there’s real experimentation happening, much of it promising, some of it quietly radical. At the same time I’m seeing teams innovate in the opposite, analogue direction. Not because they’re nostalgic, conservative or anti tech (though some may be!), but because they’re worried about academic integrity or concerned about the over-automation of thinking. We’re seeing a return to in-person vivas, handwritten tasks, oral assessments. So these are not new but because they are being re-justified in light of present challenges. It could be seen as innovation via resistance.
Collaboration as a key component of innovation
In amongst the amazing work reflected on, I see a lot a claims for innovative practice in the many Advance HE fellowship submissions I read as internal and external reviewer. In some ways, seemingly very similar activities could be seen as innovative in one place and not another. While not a mandatory criterion, innovation is:
- Encouraged through the emphasis on evidence-informed practice (V3) and responding to context (V4).
- Often part of enhancing practice (A5) via continuing professional development.
- Aligned with Core Knowledge K3, which stresses the importance of critical evaluation as a basis for effective practice—and this often involves improving or innovating methods.In the guidance for King’s applicants, innovation is positioned as a natural outcome of reflective practice
So while the new PSF (2023) doesn’t promote innovation explicitly, what it does do (and this is new) is promote collaboration. it explicitly recognises the importance of collaboration and working with others, across disciplines, roles and institutions as a vital part of educational practice. That’s important because whilst in the past perceptions of innovation have stretched the definition and celebrated individual excellence in this space many of the most meaningful innovations I’ve seen emerge from collaboration and conversation. This takes us back to Twain and borrowing, adapting, questioning.
We talk of interdisciplinarity (often with considerable insight and expertise like my esteemed colleagues Dave Ashby and Emma Taylor) and sometimes big but often small-scale, contextual innovation comes from these sideways encounters. But they require time, permission and a willingness to not always be the expert in the room. Something innovators with a lingering sense of the inspiring, individual creative may have trouble reconciling.
Failure and innovation
We have a problem with failure in HE. We prefer success stories and polished case studies. But real innovation involves risk: things not quite working, not going to plan. Even failed experiments are educative. But often we structure our institutions to minimise that kind of risk, to reward what’s provable, publishable, measurable, successful. I have argued that we do something similar to students. We say we want creativity, risk-taking, deep engagement. But we assess for precision, accuracy, conformity to narrow criteria and expectations. We encourage resilience, then punish failure with our blunt, subjective grading systems. We ask for experimentation but then rank it. So it’s no surprise if staff, like students, when encouraged to be creative or experimental, can be reluctant to try new things.
AI and innovation
I think I am finally getting to my point. The innovation AI catalyses goes far beyond AI use cases. It’s prompting people to re-examine their curricula, reassess assessment designs, rethink what we mean by original thinking or independent learning. It’s forcing conversations we’ve long avoided, about what we value, how we assess, and how we support students in an age of automated possibility. Even WHETHER we should continue to grade. (Incidentally I heard, amongst many fine presentations yesterday at the King’s /Cadmus event on assessment an inspiring argument against grading by Professor Bugewa Apampa from UEL. It’s so good to hear clearly articulated arguments on the necessity of confronting the issues related to grading from someone so senior).
Despite my role (Ai and Innovation Lead) some of the best innovations I’ve seen aren’t about tech at all. They’re about human decisions in response to tech. They’re about asking, “What do we not want to automate?” or “How can we protect space for dialogue, for process or for pause?”
If we only recognise innovation when it looks like disruption, we’ll miss a lot.
Twain, Mark. Letter to: Helen Keller. 1903 Mar 17 [cited June, 19, 2025] Available from: https://www.afb.org/about-afb/history/helen-keller/letters/mark-twain-samuel-l-clemens/letter-miss-keller-mark-twain-st
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