Archive of ‘EDAD’ category

Tech and Learning Leadership Summit

July 23-24, 2020   11:00am – 2:00pm Eastern

https://www.techlearningevents.com/summit

The Tech & Learning Virtual Leadership Summit is an exclusive, FREE, invitation-only virtual event for top-level executives from school districts around the country with education technology buying responsibilities. Taking the best of Tech & Learning’s in-person Leadership Summits, the Virtual Summit will provide an environment where district leaders can share their successes and challenges in facilitated small group discussions.

Conflicting logics of online higher education

Mariya P. Ivancheva, Rebecca Swartz, Neil P. Morris, Sukaina Walji, Bronwen J. Swinnerton, Taryn Coop & Laura Czerniewicz (2020) Conflicting logics of online higher education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2020.1784707

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080%2F01425692.2020.1784707&area=0000000000000001

The advent of massive open online courses and online degrees offered via digital platforms has occurred in a climate of austerity. Public universities worldwide face challenges to expand their educational reach, while competing in international rankings, raising fees and generating third-stream income. Online forms of unbundled provision offering smaller flexible low-cost curricular units have promised to disrupt this system. Yet do these forms challenge existing hierarchies in higher education and the market logic that puts pressure on universities and public institutions at large in the neoliberal era? Based on fieldwork in South Africa, this article explores the perceptions of senior managers of public universities and of online programme management companies. Analysing their considerations around unbundled provision, we discuss two conflicting logics of higher education that actors in structurally different positions and in historically divergent institutions use to justify their involvement in public–private partnerships: the logic of capital and the logic of social relevance.

Unbundling – the disaggregation of educational provision and its delivery, often via digital technologies

Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s (2006) framework of different orders of justification, connecting them to the sociological literature on institutional logics

We suggest that more explicit and nuanced national and institutional policies need to be produced around unbundled provision, which are cognisant of emerging trends in and dangers to the evolution of unbundling at public universities.

Unbundling the traditional university ‘bundle’ affects not only property, services and facilities, but also administration, evaluation, issuing credentials and even teaching (Wallhaus 2000, 22). This process involves separating educational provision (e.g. degree programmes) into component parts (e.g. courses) for delivery by multiple stakeholders, often using digital approaches (Swinnerton et al. 2018). Universities can unbundle on their own, offering individual credit-bearing modules outside bounded disciplinary curricula, or in partnership with OPM providers, offering MOOCs or credit-bearing courses or programmes. Proponents of unbundling suggest that the disaggregation of television and music production and its re-aggregation as on-demand digital content like Netflix or Spotify could represent a template for universities (Craig 2015; McIntosh 2018).

The introduction of market logic into the sector happens even if higher education is a stratified positional pseudo-market with scarce excludible resources only available to groups with access to a few prestigious institutions; its outcomes and value are difficult to measure in purely economic terms

Under accelerated marketisation, Tomlinson (2018, 714 and 724) argues, higher education is reduced to the latter frame and measured in terms of income generation, employability, consumption and performativity. Building on this framework, and relating it to unbundling, we identify the emergence of two organisational logics of higher education: the logic of social relevance and the logic of capital.

Institutional logics are ‘supra-organizational patterns of activity by which individuals and organizations produce and reproduce their material subsistence … [and] symbolic systems, ways of ordering reality… rendering experience of time and space meaningful’ (Friedland and Alford 1991, 243). Unlike new institutionalism, which remained focused on processes of institutional isomorphism or the replacement of a static single logic by another, the institutional logics perspective offers a more dynamic multi-level view: a plurality of logics coexist in complex interrelations within organisational fields like higher education

college leaders and return to campus

College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus

By Kevin R. McClure     Jun 25, 2020

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-06-25-college-leaders-must-explain-why-not-just-how-to-return-to-campus

So far, the why question seems harder for many institutions and their leaders to forthrightly answer, yet it is vitally important.

Presidents have also shared their views through anonymous surveys, highlighting worries about hitting enrollment targets or managing revenue losses. There is an unmistakable sense that they see their responsibility mainly in institutional terms: We must resume in-person instruction to ensure the financial viability of the college or university. Protecting institutions’ budgets is apparently also worth the risk.

Rationales like these have gaping holes. Some problems are obvious, like being silent on the health and safety of faculty, staff, students and community members who aren’t aged 18 to 25. The disregard for people working on and near campuses recalls practices at an Amazon warehouse or meat-packing plant, where the expectation is that workers must show up in the interests of the organization and consumer.

The rationales I’ve seen are problematic for other reasons, too. First, they show little concern for slowing or stopping the spread of COVID-19.

Second, they demonstrate a disregard for serving the public good. I haven’t read a single announcement or plan that anchors an institution’s decisionmaking in shared community interests. Few presidents are willing to say that what the public needs right now is to live in a society free of a deadly virus, and that it is the responsibility of higher education to contribute to that effort by keeping people off campuses that were often

Third, the rationales I’ve seen don’t seriously contend with the differential effects of the pandemic by race and income. Racism means that people of color are more exposed and less protected when it comes to the virus. When a president says returning to campus is worth the risk, who is bearing the burden of that risk-taking?

Finally, the plans I’ve seen have a strained relationship with truth and science. In many states, new virus cases and hospitalizations are rising, with clusters in nursing homes and daycare centers. Yet presidents continue to announce that it is safe for students to return to residence halls.

Katherine Newman, president of the University of Massachusetts Boston, provided an example that other presidents could follow by announcing that the institution would continue to be primarily online in the fall. Explaining this decision, she noted that that Black and Latinx “populations have borne a disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality in the pandemic, and many students live in multi-generational minority households where exposure to the virus would be particularly problematic.”

educational leadership

There are so many managers …. more concerned about positions and using employees as stepping stones. Sadly, these type of bosses leave a trail of destruction in their path.

administrator parle

Top 31 Buzzwords that Employees Truly Hate

Bosses who want to earn their employees’ respect should avoid these tired, irritating cliches.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/top-31-buzzwords-that-employees-truly-hate.html

Buzzwordscorporate-speakbiz-blab–call it what you will, most organizations are awash in it.

The Atlantic recently asked its readers to rate 32 business buzzwords against one another, in something of an elimination tournament

 

Failure to lead

Failure to Lead (what your team will never tell you)

Craig Janssen  Jun 17, 2019

leadership is about people, not production. it doesn’t matter how big of an expert you are in your field, mastery isn’t the same as influence.

The problem is that the people on your team aren’t you. Not only are their strengths and talents different — their output is different.

So, you wind up putting controls in place.

controls are temporary in their results. They don’t create loyalty or a following.

Not only that, but the controls work against you because by their very nature, they make people feel as if they aren’t trusted. And that lack of trust is a huge limiter on your influence.

Trust has to be given before it is received, and there is no influence without trust.

why do so many organizations rely on control to produce output? In short, because control is far easier to achieve than influence. control like sugar. It’s easy to get. It’s addictive. It’s tasty. It feels good and feeds our ego. It provides instant rewards — so we often ignore that it’s not a long-term strategy. Besides, control is a quick fix when it comes to output.If control is sugar, then influence is more like protein. It’s full of the building blocks for muscle. It takes time and consistency to build. But it also has more strength and staying power.

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More on leadership in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=leadership

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