Editorial IETI 61/2

University leadership is an immensely complex task, especially at times of rapid change and uncertainty. One might say that leading a university is akin to managing a town or small city, as they are essentially autonomous microcosms, with thousands of stakeholders, that reflect wider society; They provide infrastructure and services through their academic departments, administration, accommodation and catering facilities, networked technologies, wellbeing services, libraries, medical centres, etc. and play a key role in developing citizenship and serving society. To manage the complexity, higher education (HE) institutions develop governance structures that often separate the administrative and the academic functions into parallel strands of work, and they continuously seek to enhance each strand in pursuit of efficiencies and increased effectiveness. However, this separation is not helpful, as some issues do not become visible and relevant decisions cannot be taken until they reach the very top of the leadership chain, where the two strands of decision-making and resource-allocation powers eventually meet. Occasionally, one might wonder how such complex organisations manage to function as a single, coherent entity!

It is in these types of settings that we attempt to introduce innovation in learning and teaching in HE. However, disrupting the status quo can be both exciting and worrying for the innovators if they are not familiar with their institutional leadership hierarchies. In this issue, the importance of effective HE leadership is highlighted by Zulfqar, Valcke, Hussain and Devo’s study, from Pakistan and Belgium. The authors introduce us to transformational leadership, leadership that aims to bring about change that is collegial in nature, and the impact of which can inspire the development of shared vision, values, and purpose. They highlight the importance of leaders’ awareness and their ability to reflect-in-context as pertinent to the transformation of academic cultures.

Leadership is demonstrated in all parts of an HE institution – from the physical and digital estate management to administrative departments, and all the way through to the curriculum of subject disciplines, their signature pedagogies and how provision is structured and offered. This issue explores topics where strong HE leadership is a necessary requirement for the enhancement of learning and teaching, and for setting the foundations for future innovation. More specifically the areas of:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and the new challenges it poses in relation to upholding academic integrity. Cotton, Cotton and Shipway, from the UK, articulate the range of benefits AI tools offer, such as increased student engagement, collaboration skills and accessibility, but firmly call for policies and procedures to be developed by university leadership, alongside making available training and support.

• ‘Dual mode readiness’, a term used by Roberts, Scott, Cranney, Cumming, Angstmann, Nehme and Watson, from Australia. They propose guiding principles for HE leaders and faculty who may need to quickly pivot between online and campus-based teaching; the authors advocate for equity and fairness for all students and faculty as a top priority for leaders to consider. Some more applied subject disciplines provide challenges in developing an equivalent online pivot offer, but Zhang and Gao, who work in China, the USA and the Ukraine, report that even highly applied disciplines, such as piano teaching via distance learning, can be interactively taught online.

• Immersive scheduling and timetabling of teaching. Goode, Syme and Nieuwoudt’s research, from Australia, report on immersive scheduling patterns that have the potential to influence the successful achievement of learning outcomes and can be particularly supportive to diverse non-traditional cohorts in undergraduate programmes, especially when active learning pedagogies are purposefully designed into the student experience. This study offers insights into how institutions can potentially widen participation and access to HE opportunities.

When considering the governance divide between academic and administrative parts of an HE institution, it is helpful to conceptualise a ‘third space’, a notional, ideological space (not a physical space), in which expertise is brought together and cross-institutional working takes place. As a concept, third space originates from postcolonial theory (Bhabha, 1994), and offers a helpful way of framing elements of work and ways of being in HE. Whitchurch (2008) was the first to apply it to the HE context in her studies of academic developers, learning technologists and other blended professional that do not sit comfortably within a single academic department nor are they fully part of administrative units within an institution, whose purpose is to maintain values and quality; Instead, their work cuts across all the core functions of an institution and continuously redefines its metrics of excellence by enabling change.

In this issue, Carter and Nguyen, from New Zealand, apply the concept of third space to digital aspects of doctoral pedagogies, and the consideration of academic blogs, which sit outside of rigid institutional structures and relevant audit mechanisms. The authors consider how academic blogs facilitate knowledge exchange activity with external audiences, which is an important remit of universities engaged in research, and conclude that the use of blogs has the pedagogic potential to support doctoral students’ writing development. Furthermore, Anttila,Tikkanen and Pyhältö from Finland and South Africa, take the opportunity to remind us of the importance of the supervisory relationship in developing doctoral skills. They explore the differing perceptions held by supervisors and doctoral students about the quality and quantity of supervision and advocate that alignment of perceptions in necessary to support students’ persistence, success, and satisfaction. Academic relationships between instructors and students, and their correlation to attainment is also a concern for Abed, Abed and Shackelford, who offer a Saudi Arabian perspective on this, and highlight the implications of their research for teaching practices and styles.

Tight, from the UK, focuses on a review of curriculum in HE, which traditionally firmly sits in the domain of academic departments, but its delivery is influenced by various institutional hierarchies. Tight highlights the lack of research attention given to the HE curriculum compared to the vast research that has been undertaken on curricula within compulsory education settings. They review existing literature in this area and find that there is a diverse and extensive global interest in the topic, albeit the research predominantly focuses on smaller scale initiatives. Tight makes pertinent recommendations for further, larger-scale and comparative research on curriculum transformation practices across disciplines, institutions, and educational systems. There is significant work still to be carried out in this area, and third space working will inevitably be key to developing a system-level understanding of HE curricula and the associated leadership that is required.

However, the value of smaller case initiatives remains highly important to understanding an enhancing academic practice, and many are showcased in this journal. As well as providing insights into innovation in HE, these smaller studies truly highlight the complexity of researching ‘the HE curriculum’ and the vast number of facets that this might involve, as well as the countless contexts in which innovation and research take place. For example, in this issue, we have:

• Lameshkani, Soleimani, Khoshsima and Jafarigohar, from Iran, who report on the positive impact of applying constructive alignment to English language learning contexts through a virtual flipped classroom.

• Liu, Zhu, Huang, Wang and Chang, from China. They report on factors influencing college students’ motivations to study online during the recent pandemic. Although online classes were essential in nature to business continuity of universities, they found that student engagement was based on perceptions of expectations, usefulness and social influence. Furthermore, digital competencies and the choice of software to facilitate online learning are further explored by Tomczyk, Limone and Guarini, from Poland and Italy.

• Fritz and Marchewka consider perceptions surrounding virtual student exchanges, which have become more popular post-pandemic. Drawing on transformative learning theory, the authors compare exchanges between universities in Poland and Japan. These virtual exchanges bring together students from across the globe and promote the development of graduate attributes and skills that are appropriate for the workforce of the future.

• Bonsak, Favrod, Berney, Sohrmann, Frobert and Nguyen, from Switzerland, draw on the principles and techniques of stand-up comedy performance and apply it to HE teaching. They offer us an experimental instructional design model that supports students to connect emotions and cognitions through experiential learning in healthcare education.

• Chen, Chen and Chen, from Taiwan, explore the role and use of narrative and image structure, and how these have the potential to influence students’ achievement in design education.

Such studies enhance our understanding of innovation within the HE curriculum and raise questions about how HE institutions and their leadership can support the development of academic practice. This issue invites you to consider the latest research in the field, alongside the complexity that surrounds the mutliplicity of HE contexts in which innovation takes place. Considering innovation-in-context offers us a more nuanced approach to understanding how HE pedagogic innovation is fostered or hindered, developed and shared, and how we might implement research-informed practice within our own contexts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou

Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou is Executive Dean and Vice Provost at Bath Spa University, UK, and Professor of Higher Education. As a National Teaching Fellow with extensive leadership experience, Kyriaki has worked 27+ years in the field of innovation in higher education. Her work informs institutional, national and international policy and practice.