Posted by Lac Tran on Thursday, 05 December 2013 in Leadership/Management

Higher education is currently facing changes of epic proportions, changes spawned due to increasing regulation, intensive competition between educational institutions, new technologies, new methods of providing educational courses, increasing demands from students, parents and faculty, and lower funding allocations all around, just to name a few.

Today however, the issue I want to raise focuses on just a sliver of the changes required from faculty and leadership in order to accommodate this new wave of technology-dependent student populations.

Here’s an example of how classroom interaction can be used to build a case for promoting the development of new skill sets for our faculty leaders:

• • An interactive case-study video is posted on the student social network to be discussed for the next class
  • Students watch the video and provide their comments on the case study prior to class
  • The class meets to discuss possible decisions in the case-study using simulated tools to provide outcomes derived from these alternatives
    • Analyze decisions made within the case study and their associated outcomes
    • Examine alternatives provided by students
    • Articulate how they would make these decisions if they faced the same challenges and anticipate the results derived from their decisions
    • Simulate these alternatives to produce different best practices

This example demonstrates the use of available technology to improve students’ participation. That’s because visualized case-studies done through video allow students to figuratively live within the case study. Even the most reticent of young individuals use social media to voice their opinion and participate within a non-threatening environment, so why can’t we apply that same concept to the classroom?

While in my research I’ve found that students have no problems in adopting this new method, faculty leaders on the contrary have experienced great difficulty in implementing this new process. Sadly, this holds true across similar case studies.

The problems stem from the faculty’s poor adoption of these innovative, technology-driven teaching tools. Besides investing in sound educational technology foundations, educational leaders and CIOs need to focus on the development of faculty by providing incentives in leading these modern, creative methodologies.

So what can CIOs do to boost adoption among their faculty? What is the case that CIOs should make, and what kind of incentives do you feel would be most effective?

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