Leadership Foundation

The Programme

The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, together with the four Changing the Learning Landscape partners, has created a highly innovative programme which is designed to meet institutional needs and aspirations.

This programme is designed for senior managers with overall institutional responsibility for learning and teaching. Typically a Pro Vice-Chancellor or equivalent, you are expected to create strategy which impacts on your students’ experience.

The Strategic Change Programme will equip participants to lead major change programmes that apply new methods of developing learning using innovative technologies.

The Strategic Change Programme will enable participants to:

• Experience how learning technologies are used in the UK and across the world
• Build and communicate a vision for transformation in learning and teaching through technology–based learning in their institution
• Understand how major change projects are led and managed by leading organisations
• Motivate individuals and teams to take ownership and embed changes
• Join a network of senior leaders in Higher Education in England that will provide support in implementing their plans

The focus will be on learning that can be gained from leading edge practitioners around the world. Participants will be able to compare their institution’s aspirations and their strategy for future transformation.

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Thematic content for the programme:

1. Reviewing and Creating Strategies
For the enhanced use of technology in learning and teaching Module 1 will be designed to stimulate and challenge participants in undertaking the task of leading a step change in the use of technology-enhanced learning by their institution. To achieve this we offer a credible and inspiring vision of how the future looks through the use of the technology. This will be done through:

• Demonstrating use of the technology not only in the higher education sector but beyond, in settings both of collaboration and competition
• Providing working examples of how leading edge organisations are leading and managing processes of applying technology now and in the immediate future

Following Module 1, participants will return to their institutions and review their current Learning and Teaching strategies and their enablers, and where necessary exert influence so that strategies are reviewed and changed.

2. Involvement of Students
Students are at the heart of the project and the participants need to be aware of how the student body can be engaged in contributing to the developments that will enable their institution to make the ‘step change’. It is expected that students will have an input into what a ‘step change’ means from their perspective.

3. Providing Leadership for Staff Leaders and Practitioners
For the change to be embedded in the organisation, the staff that will take a lead in creating/updating the strategy for the utilisation of learning technology and implementing it, themselves need leadership in their work in encouraging their colleagues to take initiatives that can mean initially more work and risk taking. How that leadership will be provided by the senior leaders and managers will be critical to the success of the project and the participants will be guided in identifying their own role as leaders and projecting it within the context of the programme.

4. Leading and Managing Organisational Change
A ‘step change’ implies a major difference in the way an organisation will utilise the learning technologies. The participants will need to have a clear view of what that means in their organisation by being able to compare their current practice and future strategy with leading edge practitioners and the likely developments worldwide in, say, the next five years. They will need to be able to identify the opportunities and threats in planning to implement major changes, and use management techniques to put in place and operate project management processes. They will need to have created a plan to achieve organisational change.

5. Learning Technologies
An understanding of technology-enhanced learning is essential to provide the appropriate leadership in the context of this area of work. JISC lists at least nine learning technologies in its publication ‘Effective Practice in a Digital Age’ and we need to work with the participants to select the level of awareness that they need to be effective in their leadership role.

Design of the Modules

The themes for all three modules will be the five noted above. The focus will be on:

• how the strategy is being formed and implemented with input from practitioners and case studies
• the involvement of students
• providing leadership for those in the ‘Strategy Implementation’ groups and practitioners within their institution
• how organisation change is being identified and processes put in place to lead the change and manage the project
• building up knowledge, where required, of learning technologies

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