RESOURCE-BASED EDUCATION IN CHEMICAL-ENGINEERING - THE HISTORY AND IMPACT OF A RADICAL TEACHING INNOVATION

While the adoption of resource-based education (RBE) in the teaching of individual engineering subjects is not novel, the introduction of RBE throughout an entire university department is unprecedented. This paper presents the underlying rationale of the innovation, describes the management processes employed in the first five years of the project, and describes the impact on teaching staff. Group and personal interviews, and an instrument designed to reveal teachers' level of acceptance of the innovation, yielded three levels of response profile analysis. Differences in response profiles and in raw scores at different developmental stages of concern were observed between experienced and inexperienced users of the innovation, and interpreted in terms of concerns theory. Implications are drawn for the role of academic administrators and institutional staff development programmes in assisting staff to come to terms with radical teaching innovations that are introduced on a department-wide basis. © 1990, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.