Leading institutional change in digital education: from emergency response to the foundations of strategic transformation

Parry, Dewi, Horrocks, Simon, Lynch, Caroline and Doe, Hannah 2021. Leading institutional change in digital education: from emergency response to the foundations of strategic transformation. Presented at: ALT Annual Conference 2021, Virtual, 07-09 September 2021.

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Abstract

This presentation reflects on the journey that one research-intensive Higher Education Institution took through the challenging context of the pandemic, developing leadership capacity within its learning technologist community and collaborative working practices to accelerate strategic development in digital education. It will be of interest to anyone involved in leading or implementing institutional change in learning and teaching. Pre-Covid, the institution had a nascent digital education strategy and uneven learning technologist capacity spread across its campuses. To address the unique demands of the pandemic, the University developed a single digital education team structure with a distributed senior team leadership model. Tangible outcomes of this new approach include partnerships with all academic Schools and an institutional career pathway for learning technologists. The new team was a critical factor in securing the benefits of the Digital Education Programme, in which the University had developed a community of practice of over 200 academics, professional services staff and students to co-create a coherent institutional approach to the resourcing and organisation of digital education during the pandemic. It delivered an ambitious programme that involved working rapidly in eight themed working groups to gather information, identify key issues, formulate and implement strategies, frameworks and solutions within the space of three months. One of the main streams of work was the development of a Digital Education Framework, which provided programme and module teams with guidance about design and delivery of courses in 2020/21. The Framework provided a wide range of options for learning and assessment design to ensure all students experience a core consistency to their education during this unique year. Its creation would involve working in partnership with the Students Union, the University’s Student Champions group and the wider student body to understand and act on student perspectives and aspirations regarding digital education. In addition to this functional framework, a more ambitious Digital Education Roadmap was developed by early 2021 to underpin a sustainable, structured approach to the provision of high quality blended and online education post-pandemic. Ambitious targets for this transformation agenda include a holistic review of the University’s digital learning ecosystem. This presentation will reflect on the enormity of the task, the speed and scale of this institutional change programme which provided unprecedented focus on learning and teaching for this particular research-intensive institution. We will discuss the issues surrounding developing strategy, implementing policies and frameworks, devolved leadership, and the political implications and power balance related to organisational change. In addition, we will consider the pros and cons of the shift from a dispersed learning technologist community to an institutional partnership model, providing opportunities to address school-based stakeholder needs while driving the transition from an emergency reactive outlook to a focus on strategic development. It will also highlight challenges such as differential attitudes towards to change across the institution and establishing a shared understanding of the role of Learning Technologists. The presentation will provide a rich picture of institutional transformation, including a range of critical perspectives from university senior management, academic Schools, learning technologists and students.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Speech)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Modern Languages Academic & Student Support Service
Related URLs:	https://youtu.be/y2BdisGdFPQ
Last Modified:	10 Dec 2022 02:14
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/148902

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