Summary
Most advocates of e-learning in higher education explicitly or implicitly link e-learning to the need for institutional transformation through new approaches to teaching and learning and new organizational models. The pressing digital transformation question is, how will we manage and plan the critical challenge of change management and the need to consider how organizational change is conceptualized.
Whether a clear project plan with different stages of development and implementation or a more generic rationale for digital transformation is needed really depends on the scale and stage of the digital transformation. Higher education institutions typically move through five different stages as they introduce and ultimately integrate e-learning as a strategic plan:
It is of utmost importance for an institute to understand, on various organizational levels, at which of these five “maturity stages” they are. The more advanced the stage the more institutional support and integration in the overall management is essential; conversely, in very early stages of eLearning development, efforts of individual faculty and the initiates on operational level will do. “Simple” early digital activities in learning should not be overly controlled or managed, rather they should be left as a phase of discovery where new ideas can be piloted and learned from, with a view to promoting the possibility of strategic change.
One of the first steps to make progress in planning the digital ambition is to measure the institutional digital transformation “readiness”. Key readiness measurements are: costs and funding, IT infrastructure, organizational culture, faculty readiness, learner readiness, planning & organizational structure. Discover them in our toolkit.
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