The Shake and Bake Principle
If you grew up watching television in the 1980s or 1990s, you may remember the old Shake ’n Bake commercials. A parent would be making dinner, a kid would help shake chicken in a bag of seasoning, and at the end the child would proudly announce, “Shake ’n Bake… and I helped!” The line worked because the joke was obvious. The kid clearly did not cook dinner, but they still wanted credit for being part of it. That small moment captures something deeply human: people care more about outcomes they helped create, even when their contribution was relatively small. The dinner may not have depended on the child’s effort, but participation changed how they saw the result. It was not just dinner anymore. It was dinner they helped make.
That instinct shows up constantly in digital learning work. It appears in course design meetings, faculty development initiatives, LMS transitions, committee work, and student projects. When people can see their fingerprints on the final result, engagement changes. What was once “the thing being implemented” becomes something they helped shape.
The size of the contribution matters less than the fact that people contributed at all. If people cannot see themselves in the process, they rarely stay invested in the outcome.
Where Participation Becomes Ownership
I have seen this happen during faculty video projects. Our team launched a short faculty introduction video initiative for online courses, and many instructors initially approached the studio cautiously. Some assumed the process would take too much time. Others worried they would not feel polished enough on camera. Instead of handing faculty a rigid script, we used a conversational process. We mixed teaching philosophy questions with lighter prompts, helped faculty relax on camera, and handled the editing ourselves. Once instructors saw the finished videos, something changed. They were proud of them. Not because the videos were perfect, but because the videos felt authentic to who they were. Faculty shared the videos with colleagues, talked about them across departments, and started thinking differently about how they presented themselves to students online. The technology itself was not the breakthrough. The sense of ownership was.
I have seen similar dynamics emerge in much smaller decisions. During faculty development shell creation, I cared deeply about maintaining searchable naming conventions because they improved organization and support workflows. I wanted consistency in identifiers like DEV-ENGL-1301 or DEV-CHEM-1411. What I did not initially realize was how much faculty cared about what came after that structure. Once I loosened control over the final portion of the naming convention, faculty became noticeably more invested in their development shells. The operational organization remained intact, but faculty gained room for identity and personalization. It was a reminder that not every standard needs to become a constraint.
That balance between structure and flexibility appears constantly in instructional design work. Some subject matter experts arrive with strong design instincts and only need help building inside the LMS. Others need more scaffolding around accessibility, engagement, or online teaching expectations. Both approaches require respect.
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. We know instructional design. Faculty know their disciplines, students, and classroom realities. Good collaboration depends on treating both forms of expertise as valuable. I often ask faculty a simple question during development conversations: “How would you prefer to learn this?” That question changes the tone immediately. It shifts the interaction from implementation to collaboration.
The same principle applies to students. In my digital video courses, students build YouTube channels as part of their coursework. The assignments include substantial structure and scaffolding, but students retain freedom over the channel identity, topic focus, and creative direction. Some students create media-review channels. Others build gaming projects, tutorial brands, music commentary spaces, or documentary-style concepts. The structure helps students succeed, but the creative freedom helps them connect to the work in more meaningful ways.
I have also seen this dynamic emerge in faculty teams developing master courses. One business program I worked with created strong shared course structures while still leaving room for instructors to shape delivery, examples, and classroom personality. Because faculty helped build the courses rather than simply inherit them, departmental investment remained strong long after implementation.
When Participation Becomes Theater
Participation only works when it is genuine. Faculty and students are surprisingly good at recognizing the difference between meaningful collaboration and performative input.
I learned that lesson the hard way early in my time as a director. Our institution needed an online proctoring solution for faculty who wanted additional reassurance around online testing environments. At the time, both our VP of Instruction and I were new in our roles, and we focused heavily on solving the operational problem quickly. Since we already used other Respondus products, selecting Respondus LockDown Browser and Monitor initially felt like a logical decision. Faculty pushback followed almost immediately. In hindsight, they were right. We had solved the operational problem without creating ownership in the process. Faculty wanted participation before implementation, not feedback after the decision had effectively been made. We eventually formed a faculty evaluation committee and conducted a much more collaborative review process. Interestingly, we still landed on the same platform in the end. But by involving faculty directly in the conversations, evaluations, and implementation planning, the tone changed significantly.
That experience reshaped how I think about buy-in. People rarely expect total control over institutional decisions. They do, however, want evidence that their participation mattered. That distinction matters because collaboration can easily become theater. Higher education is full of surveys distributed after decisions are finalized and committees asked to “provide feedback” on systems that have already been selected. People recognize those situations quickly. Participation without influence is not ownership. It is optics. In digital learning, we often talk about engagement as if it begins after implementation. In reality, engagement often begins much earlier. It begins when people feel invited into the process instead of managed through it. That does not mean every decision must become democratic or endlessly collaborative. Good leadership still requires expertise, direction, and sometimes difficult decisions. But people are far more willing to support change when they can see where they fit inside it.
The child in the Shake ’n Bake commercial did not cook dinner, but they still understood something important: participation changes how people relate to outcomes.
In higher education, that difference can shape everything from course design to institutional change. The goal is not to surrender expertise, but to design processes where people can recognize their influence.
Sometimes the path from compliance to genuine engagement is not a major redesign or a perfect rollout strategy.
Sometimes it is simply giving people the ability to honestly say: “And I helped.”
Brad Denison is the Director of Educational Technology Services at College of the Mainland, where he supports distance education, classroom technology, and faculty-focused EdTech initiatives. His work centers on making digital learning practical, engaging, and a little less intimidating for the people actually using it.
