A Holistic Approach to Building Institutional and Faculty Capacity for Digital Education and Digital Pedagogy

Author

Zafar Syed, Western UniversityFollow

Date of Submission

7-25-2024

Document Type

DiP

Degree

Doctor of Education

Department

Education

Keywords

digital pedagogy, digital education, digital transformation, adaptive leadership, distributed leadership

Abstract

Digital technology continues to create new pathways in disrupting the teaching and learning exchange. Higher education institutions must not only contend with ongoing demographic, financial, and political shifts, but also have to respond to changing market demands for flexible delivery, greater access, and increased student expectations. The absence of a robust and comprehensive institutional response to these disruptions, leads to uneven technology integration on the part of faculty resulting in inconsistent learning experience for students. This Dissertation-in-Practice (DiP) articulates a holistic approach to building institutional and faculty capacity for digital education and pedagogy at a public college in a Canadian urban center. Working within an interpretivist epistemology, it leverages an adaptive and distributed leadership approach coupled with a constructivist, critical, and experiential grounding to education, to address institutional gaps in educational technology integration. Faculty capacity building initiatives constitute the core of a change implementation plan that seeks to identify and remove affective, pedagogic, and organizational barriers to technology integration while developing faculty’s technological and pedagogic knowledge base and disposition as 21st century educators. This is further supported by a phased change path designed to holistically build institutional capacity in supporting seamless integration of digital education practices across all instructional modalities. Change agents draw on socially constructed, collaborative, and inclusive techniques consistent with the leadership approach and a change model that also draws on psychosocial factors to engage participants in and through an organizational digital transformation change process.

Recommended Citation

Syed, Z. (2024). A Holistic Approach to Building Institutional and Faculty Capacity for Digital Education and Digital Pedagogy. The Organizational Improvement Plan at Western University, 455. Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/oip/455