Taking the Lead: Strategic Management for e-Learning
This is an executive summary of the report from 'Taking the Lead: Strategic Management for e-Learning'
Some Key Messages
This report is for the chief executives and senior executive officers of New Zealand’s tertiary education institutions and organisations. It is designed to help you consider the contribution you can make to the strategic development and management of e-learning in your institution.1
‘e-Learning’ in its various forms is transforming the way New Zealand tertiary educational institutions are teaching and supporting their students. It is a transformation involving fast-developing technologies, some complex re-design and integration of institutional systems and the recruitment of new categories of specialists to assist teachers and managers use these new technologies. Much of the detail of this transformation process, quite appropriately, will be managed by specialist staff and middle managers rather than by senior executive staff. However, if these developments are to achieve the key strategic objectives of the institutions, senior leaders and managers do need to exercise strong leadership in a number of key areas. The purpose of this study has been to identify these key areas and to offer guidance to institutional leaders as to how they might be addressed.
This document is an executive summary of the complete report of the “e-Learning Management Resource Project”. Nine themes are explored in the full report, which is a substantial document of 100+ pages. These nine themes were drawn from an earlier study on quality assurance for e-learning. In seeking to prepare a much shorter and tighter summary document, we have reduced and tightened these categories to just six:
Within these six themes we have not covered all the areas and challenges of which senior leaders should have some knowledge. However, they are the areas requiring strategic direction from the most senior levels of their institutions where challenges cannot be resolved by middle managers, technical experts or teachers, without senior executive involvement.
In this summary document, we briefly expand each of these six themes, suggest the strategic questions that chief executives need to ask under each theme, and identify some of the principal options that are available to them.
An important part of the larger project was to look at current institutional practice and develop a set of case studies illustrating the themes explored in the report. We have appended the case studies to the larger report. In this summary report, key links are drawn between each theme and the case studies.
1: In this report, ‘e-learning’ is being used as shorthand for digitally mediated teaching and learning or the application of Information and Communication Technology to teaching and learning. In general, the discussion and the case studies are referring to computer-mediated teaching and learning. However, there is a fine line between this and other digital technologies, such as teleconferencing and even broadcasting and much of the discussion and the guidelines apply equally well to this larger grouping of technologies.