Campus leaders who never taught with technology themselves are still tasked with funding and resource decisions for tech, blended, and online programs. This session provides concrete ways to collaborate with C-suite leaders and help them to value tech-enhanced teaching as a driver for mission-critical outcomes: learner persistence, retention, and satisfaction.
Description
As an innovative leader in education, you know how online, blended, and technology-enhanced design creates opportunities for learning beyond our physical campuses. But communicating this to campus presidents, provosts, and deans who sometimes do not have experience teaching or learning with technology can raise a number of challenges. While 85% of college and university presidents say that online programs are a strategic priority, only 43% of them feel knowledgeable about making decisions regarding online programs (ACE, 2017; Lederman, 2018).
We look to today’s college and university leaders to provide the vision, strategic paths, and operational priorities for online, blended, and technology-enhanced learning programs. We should learn how best to advocate for the adoption, continuation, and strengthening of such programs in language that our executive colleagues are already using, thanks to their conversations with accrediting bodies (HLC, 2018; NC-SARA, 2018), government funders (King & Boyatt, 2015), and community stakeholders (Friedman, H. H., & Kass-Shraibman, 2017).
In “LeaderSpeak 101,” you will learn best practices in how to frame online, blended, and tech-enhanced learning projects and programs to support non-tech-savvy campus leaders in understanding the benefits and return on investment (ROI) (Johnson, Hanna, & Olcott, 2003, 165-170). You will discover how to “translate” reports, data sets, and self-reported impact statements into executive-level material (Van Wart, et al., 2017) that speak to increased learner persistence, retention, and satisfaction. You will also learn how to engage senior leadership in focused activities (Coleman, 2018) to provide them with a better sense of the effectiveness and positive impact of online, blended, and tech-enhanced learning to drive innovation and support growth at their institutions.
The goals of our session are a) to create a conversation in which your campus executives feel safe and supported in folding technology-enhanced learning into their identity as leaders (Vedder, 2016; Miscenko, Guenter, & Day, 2017), and b) to allow you to feel heard and supported in your work advocating for student success beyond the brick-and-mortar classroom environment (Rambe & Dzansi, 2016; Reid, 2017).
Timeliness
While it has always been true that a significant number of senior campus leaders are many years beyond direct experience in the areas which they oversee, or never had such direct experience (Allen & Seaman 2012), the experience and communication gap related to teaching with technology is especially well defined today. “[N]ot one in a hundred university presidents or provosts have taught online, let alone taken a virtual course. For most senior academic officers at the top of the nation’s colleges, online is an alien practice” (Ubell, 2018).
A growing number of senior campus leaders—system chancellors, presidents, provosts, and deans—have taught online or in tech-enhanced ways, so the window of need for sessions like “LeaderSpeak 101” is, thankfully, starting to close. This session provides participants who are already campus leaders, or those who are interested in moving into leadership positions, with core job skills that can help to advance their careers.
Opportunities continually arise for serving existing and new student populations, thanks to advancements in technology. “leaderSpeak 101” will show you how to support campus leaders in discerning which technologies and strategies to pursue for the most effective institutional outcomes. Leaders want to ride the wave of revenue that online practices bring in: learn how to help them understand and value online, blended, and technology-enhanced learning . Especially in the past five years (Dervarics, 2012; Simmons, 2017; Veletsianos & Moe, 2017), there has been a concerted effort among organizations like OLC, EDUCAUSE, and the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network to de-mystify the workings of online programs for campus leaders, and this “LeaderSpeak 101” is a distillation of those efforts into a hands-on “mini boot camp” format.
Outcomes
Session participants will be able to:
- Create engaging and informative conversations to support non-tech campus leaders to discover mission-critical value in technology-enhanced learning; and
- List three framing topics that appear most frequently in executive-level reports and accreditor requirements that can be used to demonstrate the opportunity of new initiatives.
Contribution to the Conference and Field
The theme of the 2019 OLC Innovate conference is “Moving Mountains in Digital, Blended, and Online Learning.” Most sessions at OLC Innovate focus on technology tools themselves, practical implementation concerns, and design/facilitation best practices. “LeaderSpeak 101” complements and extends the efficacy of other OLC Innovate conference sessions by bridging communication and understanding gaps (Bates, 2000) between operations-level campus units and their colleagues in the executive suite. This session will also contribute to the field of online-program leadership development (e.g., the OLC’s own IELOL program [OLC, 2018]) by providing practical ways for operational-level leaders to communicate value to senior leaders in language that is platform- and modality-agnostic.
The “Educate and Reflect” Format
The Educate and Reflect session format calls for a 30-minute presentation, a 5-minute individual reflection, and 10 minutes for group Q&A. Our “LeaderSpeak 101” will share a framework for conversations and practices and then create value among the participants through their own applications, stories, examples, and questions. The “present a little and build from there together” format of Educate and Reflect sessions reflects the collaborative and supportive nature of our topic and the breadth and depth of expertise and experiences among conference attendees.
Interaction and Engagement
“LeaderSpeak 101” is about how to have engaging conversations, so both the content and the format of the session are geared toward interaction and engagement. The session will begin with a composite “beautiful problem” (Karge, et al., 2011) to solve together, followed by a “what if” brainstorming session that uncovers the key framework elements that will be shared in the 30 minutes of content presentation. Silent single-question knowledge-check quizzes are offered throughout, in order to break up learning into discrete chunks (Tobin & Behling, 2018, 112-115), with the Q&A at the end of the session focused on practical take-aways, using the “one thing” elicitation method (Anderson, 2013).
References
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