Starting Our Conversation

Leading in higher education is becoming more and more complex, leaving many to wonder why they choose to work in the higher education environment. With the increasing reliance upon information and communication technology (ICT) within the higher education institutions (HEI), leadership becomes even more difficult. Despite the multiple benefits afforded to learners using ICT, its innovative use creates unchartered and confusing territory for most HEI leaders. Utilizing the talents of three disparate but intertwined groups including faculty, staff and administrators, HEI seeking to use ICT to reach a broader student pool need to be adept at adaptation. Usually, administrators are charged with formal leadership, faculty are primarily responsible for teaching, scholarly work and service while staff hold diverse supportive roles within most institutions. Despite streamlined job descriptions and roles, research and practice suggest that leadership in HEI is increasingly contested, powers fragmented, and respective groups of agents conflicted. This affects the performance and sustainability of HEI institutions undermining directly research output and teaching excellence. This volume examines how HEI might adapt more quickly to ICT, whether embracing ICT diminishes or enhances learning, and how to lead most effectively within our emerging volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) learning environments. Higher education institutions have long been called upon to manage large amounts of information about their students, programs and structures, embedded in complex digital technology networks and expert technical practices and imagined as "smarter universities". These complex projects must be thought of in a new architecture of technologies, experts, standards and practices to enable new technologies to be linked to institutions and processes, so that they can significantly transform HE itself. Technological skills in artificial intelligence, expert systems, big data, knowledge representation, distributed and pervasive technologies, open data, smart cities, privacy, security, etc. can contribute. Against this backdrop, this volume asks the question “How can we effectively lead in higher education if and when we embrace ICT”? (The ‘we’ in this question includes administrators, faculty and staff). The argument that this volume suggests is that effective leadership in HEI requires that stakeholders at all levels and in all roles, be it formal or informal leadership, learn to adapt more quickly and to consider the potential features and benefits of ICT. It is the premise of this book that we cannot succeed unless we work together across all roles in higher education. Only in this way HEI can thrive and serve its faculty, students, and, ultimately, the society at large.