Management and Administration of Higher Education Institutions in Times of Change

Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras, Akila Sarirete, Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras, Akila Sarirete

• Editorial: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789736298
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación superior

As a new model of growth and development comes into force, higher education institutions (HEI) worldwide have to adapt and respond to a constantly changing environment. Politics, economics, advances in technology and the resultant societal change create a number of opportunities and challenges that HEI' administrators have to address on a daily basis. This volume offers practice-driven accounts of how HEI successfully embrace these challenges and opportunities. The experts and practitioners contributing to this volume reveal a complex reality of HEI today. The book links the debate on education to topical issues in politics, society and economy, including questions of technological progress, social responsibility, sustainability, well-being and, broadly understood, resilience. The authors emphasise the importance of the role of the university in supporting new models of growth by ensuring that the institutions strive towards inclusive education for all. Topics examined in this timely book include university social responsibility, emerging technologies in Higher Education and digital games-based learning and organizational innovation, in a range of international contexts. Given its practice-drive approach, this book will be invaluable for researchers, administrators and leaders in higher education management.

Chapter 1

Emerging Technologies and Higher Education: Management and Administration in Focus

Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras and Akila Sarirete

1. Introduction

Over the past few decades, the higher education (HE) landscape underwent dramatic changes, causing strain on higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide. If we were to identify the one single reason behind these developments we would have to point to the unspoken of, nevertheless taking place, process of transition to a new model of growth and development worldwide, and the resultant search for new models of growth at regional, national, and local levels. This process triggers several concerns, constraints, and considerations, which in the context of HE and HEI translate in dwindling state’s resources and capacity to fund public tertiary education, the resultant pressures for HEI greater self-sufficiency, changes on the labor market, and the need for HEI to adjust to the evolving labor market demand, increased mobility of students and professors. The academic debate is filled with very well-argued accounts of these developments (van der Wende, 2007; Visvizi, Lytras, & Daniela, 2018). As these processes condition changes in the society, including life style and child-rearing models, worldviews, mindsets, aspirations, motivation, an additional challenge that HEIs have to face is that of meeting the new generation of students’ and faculty’s expectations, modes of communication, ways of learning, teaching, acquiring skills (cf. Brennan, 2008). Against this backdrop, it is necessary that the question of managing and administering HEI today be rethought. Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) add an additional layer to this already complex reality (Daniela, Visvizi, Gutiérrez-Braojos, & Lytras, 2018; Delgado-Márquez, Escudero-Torres, & Hurtado-Torres, 2013; Garrison & Kanuka, 2004; Hung & Chi-Yin Yuen, 2010; Lytras, Visvizi, Damiani, & Mathkour, 2018). However, as this volume suggests, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing (CC); augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR); Internet of Things (IoT); and blockchain; bear the promise to effectively assisting HEI administrators in navigating their institutions through the period of profound change. In this context, three questions have to be addressed. Who is involved in managing and administering HEI? What technologies are concerned and what can they offer? What is at stake? The objective of this introductory chapter is to address these questions and to explain how chapters included in this volume add to this discussion.

2. Managing and Administering HEI: Who is Involved?

A typical conversation on managing and administering HEI oscillates around such questions as: how to attract and retain students, how to attract and retain faculty, how to maintain quality of education, to build a brand and maintain a good name on the market, how to gain and sustain a respectable position in domestic and international rankings of universities, how to be attractive to students by offering curriculum that matches the labor market demand and the needs of the society at large, and how to secure financial soundness of the institution. The imperative to contribute to the society at large, outlined in HEIs’ mottos and missions, acquires a new twist today in the form of HEIs contribution to sustainable and inclusive growth (cf. Pavlin, 2018). Having said that, the three questions that need to be addressed are: First, who is involved in managing and administering HEI? Second, to what extent and how advances in ICT can make the process more efficient, more transparent, more participatory? Third, can ICT thereby facilitate a dialogue, optimum resources utilization, and hence strengthening resilience and sustainability of a given HEI?

Managing and administering HEIs is a field that requires the engagement of a variety of stakeholders. They include not only administrators, such as presidents, vice-presidents, provosts, human resource management teams, office assistants, but also, of course, deans, heads of departments. What frequently tends to be ignored is that faculty, both through the bodies that represent them and individually, are also part of the process (cf. Ginsberg, 2011). Students’ involvement follows. Clearly, the approach “one size fits all” is impossible in the domain of managing and administering HEI. Depending on the regulatory framework within which an HEI operates, depending on in-house rules, statutes, and regulations, depending on culture and a myriad of other factors, each HEI will display its own governance model and the associated model of administration and management. The benefits of advanced ICT in all those contexts will have to be employed differently. Whereas ICT will not be a panacea to all ills and weaknesses diverse HEI models of administration and management will display at times, it is possible to identify the key areas where ICT may make a difference. One of these areas is transparency and information diffusion within a given HEI. This issue has many facets. That is, it may concern issues as simple as the events’ team updating in real time other offices and faculty about possible events and room unavailability. It may also relate to granting equal access to information about events, invitations to local conferences, scholarships, and other items that are considered perks by the faculty. All too frequently, information of this kind is not disclosed, thus denying equal access to some groups of the faculty, and therefore demotivating them. This is obviously an issue that encroaches on the function of human resource management, which in HEI, perhaps more than in any other organization requires particularly skillful talent management. In this view, advances in ICT bear the promise of bypassing several problems current management and administration models display. The following section sheds light on this issue.

3. What Kind of Technologies and to What End?

In context of the big data turn and quantum computing, several technologies are bound to change the face of HE and, specifically of HEI administration and management. These technologies include AI and CC; AR, VR, and MR technologies; IoT; and blockchain. These technologies and their associated techniques (such as data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, sentiment analysis, and computational linguistics) and applications (such as social media or cloud computing) create a number of opportunities for the variety of stakeholders involved in the making of HE and comprising HEI to more effectively than ever influence it. The following paragraphs offer a brief overview of the potential inherent in the key technologies listed above as regards the domain of managing and administering HEI.

The ability – related to the big data turn – to manage and make sense of huge data sets means that our analytical and prescriptive capacities have been substantially boosted over past years. The implications thereof are fundamental for exploring, understanding, and exploiting challenges and opportunities inherent in an HEI external and internal contexts. This may include: analysis of demographic trends in combination with likely cohorts of incoming students, analysis of sentiments and would be students’ interests and preferences regarding the selection of their major and minor, analysis of trends and tendencies regarding study abroad preferences, analysis of macroeconomic developments and the resultant emerging patterns of business activity in combination with prospective demands of the labor market. Obviously, a detailed insight into these issues would enable HEI administrators to manage HEI with a great precision, exploiting opportunities and pre-empting possible risks. The good news is that big data techniques allow us to interpret huge sets of data and extract information on the variety of issues highlighted above. The challenge remains that the very process of data collection and data analysis tends to be costly and, hence very few HEI can afford it.

With regard to HEIs internal context, the big data turn creates the opportunity of gaining a clear and detailed insight into managing student flow, scheduling classes, exams, ad hoc teaching activities, events, meetings, etc. Considering that current trends in education promote ever more individualized student experience, the variety of options that HEI administrators have to consider and manage goes beyond an individual’s cognitive capacity. As a result, several resources available in HEI frequently remain idle, whereas existing synergies remain unexploited. Consider all those cases, where the top administrators are unaware of the talent (including research, achievements, interests, job, and career motivations) inherent in the faculty. Their – in several instances justifiable – ignorance renders them to search for specific skills outside the HEI, which increases the cost of running the HEI and demotivates the faculty. Examples could be multiplied. The thrust of the argument here is though that never before HEI administrators had access to as many tools facilitating their daily work as is it today. AI and CC (cf. Lytras, Aljohani, Visvizi, Ordonez De Pablos, & Gasevic, 2018), each in their own way, might in this context serve as a powerful aid for administrators, correspondingly, either be released from engaging with some standardized decisions or have been provided with all information needed to take a well-informed decision on a given issue. It is too early to conclude if HEIs are exploiting this opportunity; rather it remains a challenge for HEIs to embark on it.

Blockchain technology is a yet another example of how emerging ICT revolutionize HE (Roebuck, 2019; Sicilia & Visvizi, 2018). Research on blockchain flourishes and its applications spread (Grech & Camilleri, 2017; Turkanović, Hölbl, Košič, Heričko, & Kamišalić, 2018). In context of HEIs, blockchain can be employed in a variety of ways, including storing student records and making them accessible to a variety of stakeholders holding the permission to do so. This applies not only to in-house parties but also to third parties, for example, universities where the students are applying to. From a different angle, by maintaining harmonized storage protocols, by abiding rules and laws on privacy and privacy protection, data thus collected by HEI might be accessible and usable for high-scale analytic purposes. On a smaller scale, clearly by creating individual e-portfolios of each student, their records will be immutable, thus facilitating students’ application process to other universities, jobs, etc. It would also limit the scope of perjury when it comes to academic titles. Again, examples from a variety of different fields could be multiplied. For instance, consider using blockchain to expand the library services HEIs offer to their students and faculty. Conversely, consider how blockchain might help the work done in deans’ offices, an issue flagged up in Chapter 6 in this volume. Anyone, who has ever seen the number of files that pass through the hands of people involved in this process directly, understands what a blessing it would be if data could be drawn directly from the system, organized, formatted, ready for the administrators simply to take the decision. As in the case of libraries, blockchain offers the opportunity of creating learning platforms thus, possibly, allowing remote and/or underprivileged universities, including their faculty and students, to actually join the mainstream debate. Again, examples could be multiplied and clearly it is just the beginning.

Another technology that is bound to play a profound role in how HEI are administered and managed is that of the IoT (cf. Bayani Abbasy & Vílchez Quesada, 2017). Clearly, the number of interrelated devices, each of them provided with unique identifiers, that the ecosystem of a given HEI comprises of is immense. Consider for instance just the classroom and in this context smart boards and digital highlighters and role they can play in the teaching and learning process. Or think of how smart phones and specific apps can be used in the classroom to attain very specific educational purposes (Visvizi, Jussila, Lytras, & Ijäs, 2019). Certainly, the list of distinct devices that are (or can be) connected is long. Provided that many of these can be connected, nearly automatically, whereas many other can be connected following their users’ consent, the options and alternatives that IoT creates in the context of HEI and education is vast. With regards to questions of management and administration, it is possible to distinguish the following key dimensions of IoT application: (1) safety and security, including well-being in workplace; (2) physical resources’ distribution and efficiency management, including the consumption of electricity, natural gas, water, and office materials; (3) daily management of office hours, student presence/absence, etc. To add some details, suffice it to say, that with regard to safety and security a growing array of applications employing the benefits of IoT are at hand, for example, smart monitoring, paired with IoT sensors and facial recognition to detect strangers; emergency lighting systems, locks, wristbands, emergency alarms in case of assault, etc. Regarding physical resources’ distribution and efficiency management, all administrators are aware of the cost of maintaining university facilities. Research and practice suggest that considerable savings can be attained through considerate application of IoT (Chui, Lytras, & Visvizi, 2018). From a different angle, the faculty and administrators are aware of the nuance related to a lack of some essential supplies. With regard to the daily management of student presence, IoT enables automatic detection of student presence, faculty and administrators attending meetings, voting procedures, etc.

4. Management and Administration of HEI and Emerging Technologies: What is at Stake?

Discussing the prospects and the promise of utilizing the potential of emerging technologies for the sake of improving the efficiency of management and administration of HEI, it is necessary to stress that technology separated from the purposeful agency of the individual using it is bound to be useless. Also, the application of technology in separation from the broader social context to which it is to contribute is useless. In the context of HE administration and management, emerging technologies, as this volume highlights, are expected to improve the overall efficiency of HEIs, which includes a variety of issues starting from curriculum design and managing the facilities. Nevertheless, it also implies greater consideration to ensuring faculty professional development, well-being, participation, engagement, and commitment. In brief, emerging technologies bear immense promise and potential and if used in an ethically sensitive manner, always in line with the rule of law, and in compliance with the fundamental values and norms, can add substantially to building resilience and sustainability of HEIs. Only in this way, HEIs can serve the society at large. The chapters comprising this volume attest to that.

5. Overview of the Volume

This book consists of 13 chapters, this one included. This volume makes a case for a multifaceted approach to HE and challenges HEIs face today. The contributing authors, experts, and practitioners offer an insight into what HEI do as they strive to adapt to an ever-changing context in which they operate and still deliver quality education. Case studies mirroring developments in the Arab Peninsula, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, place the question of HEI administration and emerging technologies in the center of the debate and so allow to acquire a comprehensive view of challenges that administrators have to address. The question of the role of advances in ICT are given due attention in all chapters. As a result, this volume serves as an invaluable resource for all those willing to understand how HEI across the world, including Scotland, Catalonia, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Mexico, Taiwan, enhance their excellence in times of change. The explicit focus on administration and management allows to place the HEI at the heart of the debate, thus opening a very interesting discussion on questions of leadership, innovation, and organizational change in HEI settings.

In Chapter 2, titled “How Can Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) Engender Enterprising Behavior from within Under-represented Communities?,” Emma O’Brien and Thomas M. Cooney place the discussion on HEI administration and management in context of the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. As the authors point out, only in the European Union (EU), the...