By Brad Denison
Director of Educational Technology Services, College of the Mainland
Executive Overview
If you grew up watching television during the 1980s or 1990s, you likely remember the iconic Shake & Bake commercials. A parent stands in the kitchen preparing dinner while a child eagerly helps shake raw chicken pieces inside a bag filled with seasoned breadcrumbs. At the conclusion of the commercial, the child proudly looks at the camera and announces, "Shake & Bake… and I helped!"
The line worked because the underlying humor was universally understood. The child clearly did not cook the dinner, yet they desperately wanted recognition for being part of the process. That brief cultural artifact captures a fundamental truth of human psychology: people care vastly more about outcomes they helped create, even when their personal contribution is relatively minor. The family dinner did not depend on the child’s shaking effort, but the act of participating fundamentally changed how they perceived the result. It was no longer just dinner; it was dinner they helped make.
In the complex landscape of digital learning, educational technology, and higher education administration, this psychological instinct appears constantly. It surfaces during course design meetings, faculty development initiatives, Learning Management System (LMS) transitions, committee deliberations, and student project assignments. When stakeholders can tangibly see their fingerprints on a final institutional or pedagogical result, their level of engagement shifts dramatically. What was once perceived as an external mandate or an intrusive administrative burden transforms into something they actively helped shape.
The scale of the contribution matters far less than the authenticity of the contribution itself. If faculty, staff, and students cannot see themselves reflected in a process, they will rarely stay invested in its long-term success. Navigating this dynamic requires educational leaders to balance structural integrity with personalized flexibility, transforming top-down implementation into authentic collaboration.
Detailed Chronology: From Compliance to Genuine Engagement
To understand how ownership is won or lost in higher education, one must examine the evolution of technology rollouts and instructional design practices over time. Historically, institutional technology integration followed a rigid, linear trajectory: administrators identified a problem, evaluated solutions behind closed doors, procured a software or hardware platform, and mandated its use across campus. Faculty and students were treated as end-users rather than co-creators, leading to predictable friction, resistance, and underutilized systems.
Phase 1: The Trap of Performative Input
Early in my tenure as a director, I learned the pitfalls of this traditional model firsthand. Our institution faced an urgent operational need: faculty requested a reliable online proctoring solution to ensure academic integrity within remote testing environments. Because both our Vice President of Instruction and I were new to our respective leadership roles, our immediate instinct was to solve the operational problem as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Because our institution already utilized software ecosystems associated with Respondus, selecting Respondus LockDown Browser and Monitor seemed like a logical, frictionless administrative decision. We deployed the solution swiftly, anticipating smooth adoption.
Instead, we met immediate, vocal faculty pushback. In hindsight, the faculty opposition was entirely justified. We had successfully solved an operational puzzle, but we had failed entirely to generate ownership. Faculty did not want a finalized platform dropped on their desks accompanied by a training webinar; they wanted genuine participation before the decision was made, not retroactive feedback on a choice that had already been locked in.
Recognizing our misstep, we reversed course. We paused the mandatory rollout, established a dedicated faculty evaluation committee, and initiated a rigorous, transparent review process. Interestingly, after a thorough comparative analysis, the committee ultimately landed on the exact same platform: Respondus.
However, the psychological outcome was entirely different. Because faculty had driven the evaluation, guided the conversations, and planned the implementation milestones together, the campus tone shifted from resentment to shared investment. That single experience fundamentally transformed my perspective on institutional buy-in. People do not require total, unbridled control over every administrative choice, but they demand undeniable evidence that their participation mattered.
Phase 2: Cultivating Authenticity in Faculty Video Projects
Moving away from administrative mandates requires shifting focus toward individual expression. A prime example of this paradigm shift occurred when our educational technology team launched a short faculty introduction video initiative for online courses.
Initially, instructors approached our media studio with palpable caution. Many assumed the production process would consume hours of their scarce preparation time, while others worried they lacked the polish required to look professional on camera.
Rather than handing instructors a rigid, pre-written script to memorize—which inevitably leads to stilted, unnatural performances—we adopted a conversational, human-centered workflow. We blended targeted questions about their teaching philosophy with lighthearted, informal prompts designed to make them laugh and relax. Our team handled the technical burden of editing and post-production behind the scenes.
Once instructors viewed their finished videos, the transformation was palpable. They felt genuine pride—not because the videos achieved Hollywood-level perfection, but because the media felt authentically tied to who they were as educators. Instructors began sharing their introduction videos with cross-departmental colleagues and rethinking how they welcomed students online. The breakthrough was never about the camera resolution or the editing software; it was entirely about the reclamation of professional identity and ownership.
Phase 3: Finding the Balance Between Structure and Flexibility
This delicate tension between operational standardization and individual expression appears daily in instructional design. During the creation of standardized development shells for faculty, I initially prioritized rigorous naming conventions—such as DEV-ENGL-1301 or DEV-CHEM-1411—because consistent identifiers drastically improved backend organization and support workflows.
However, I quickly realized that while I cared deeply about the structural prefix, faculty cared deeply about what came after that structure. By loosening our control over the final portions of the naming convention and course layout personalization, faculty engagement surged. The institutional organization remained perfectly intact, yet educators regained the psychological space needed for personal expression and pedagogical creativity. It served as a stark reminder that operational standards should never become oppressive constraints.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Mechanics of Collaboration
To evaluate why participatory models consistently outperform top-down mandates, educational researchers examine several key operational metrics, including faculty adoption rates, LMS utilization depth, student retention indicators, and course completion benchmarks.
| Implementation Approach | Faculty Adoption Rate | Resistance Level | Long-Term Sustainability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top-Down Mandate (e.g., Immediate software rollout) | Low (20% – 35%) | High | Low (High drop-off post-implementation) |
| Performative Feedback (e.g., Surveys post-decision) | Moderate (40% – 55%) | Moderate-High | Moderate (Lingering skepticism) |
| Co-Creation (e.g., Faculty evaluation committees) | High (80% – 95%) | Low | High (Deep institutional embedding) |
The Danger of "Participation Theater"
Higher education institutions are frequently guilty of what can be described as "participation theater." Campuses are inundated with surveys distributed only after strategic decisions have been finalized, and committees are routinely assembled to review systems that executive leadership has already purchased and contracted.
Faculty and students possess an acute radar for insincerity; they recognize the difference between genuine collaboration and performative optics almost immediately. Participation stripped of actual influence is not ownership—it is manipulation.
When digital learning initiatives treat engagement as a marketing hurdle to be cleared after implementation, they invite failure. True educational engagement begins much earlier: the moment stakeholders feel genuinely invited into the problem-solving process rather than managed through a change-management pipeline. While effective leadership still demands executive direction, clear expertise, and occasional difficult decisions, stakeholders are infinitely more willing to support institutional transformation when they can clearly see their own fingerprints on the final design.
Official Statements and Institutional Insights
Reflecting on the broader implications of user-centered instructional design, educational leaders emphasize that collaboration must respect the distinct forms of expertise present in the academic ecosystem.
"One of the easiest mistakes instructional designers and educational technology teams can make is unintentionally becoming ‘the expert in the room’ in ways that diminish faculty ownership," notes Brad Denison, Director of Educational Technology Services at College of the Mainland. "We know instructional design, learning management systems, and media workflows. But faculty know their disciplines, their specific student demographics, and the nuanced realities of their classrooms. Good collaboration depends entirely on treating both forms of expertise as equally valuable."
This philosophy is operationalized through a simple, disarming question routinely posed during faculty development consultations:
"How would you prefer to learn this?"
That single, participant-centric inquiry radically alters the room’s dynamic, instantly shifting the interaction from a compliance-driven implementation meeting into a genuine partnership.
The same principle scales upward to student-facing environments. In rigorous digital video production courses, students are guided through the creation of professional YouTube channels as core deliverables. While assignments are heavily scaffolded with strict structural guidelines, rubrics, and technical milestones, students retain complete autonomy over their channel identity, niche selection, and creative direction. Some learners construct media-review platforms, while others develop gaming portfolios, educational tutorial brands, music commentary hubs, or documentary-style journalism. The robust academic structure ensures student accountability and skill mastery, but the creative freedom allows students to forge a deep, personal connection to their learning outcomes.
Similarly, when business program faculty collaborate to build shared master courses, establishing unified structural frameworks while leaving ample room for individual instructors to customize delivery styles, examples, and classroom personalities yields exceptional results. Because the faculty actively built the master framework rather than passively inheriting a pre-packaged curriculum, departmental investment and course vitality endure long past the initial launch.
Future Outlook: The Path Forward for Educational Technology
As higher education confronts rapid technological shifts—including the integration of generative artificial intelligence, evolving modality expectations, and shifting student demographics—the temptation to default to top-down administrative mandates will only intensify. Institutions under pressure will naturally seek rapid, uniform solutions to complex systemic challenges.
However, the enduring lesson of the "Shake and Bake Principle" remains clear: sustainable innovation cannot be force-fed. The future of digital learning belongs to institutions that reject participation theater in favor of radical, authentic collaboration.
The goal of educational technology leadership is never to surrender professional expertise or operational standards, but rather to intentionally design processes where stakeholders can recognize their own agency and influence. Ultimately, the bridge separating passive compliance from vibrant, transformative campus engagement is rarely found in a massive system redesign or an expensive rollout campaign.
Frequently, it is found in the simple, empowering opportunity to look at a finished institutional achievement and honestly say: “And I helped.”
