Overall, this course (LRNT 525) has shifted my perspective on leading change in digital learning for the four course units – leadership, change management, digital learning technology implementation and utilization of data in decision-making. For each of the unit topics below, I will use quotes from the course readings that enforced ideas that I have observed so far in my career as well as new ideas that resulted in perspective shifts for me. These perspective shifts will outline the summary points to define ideas to focus on and form a digital leadership plan that I envision utilizing for my future projects as a digital leader.

Leadership

Enforcing Quote:
“If everybody wanted the same thing, there would be no need for leadership at all: everyone simply would march off in lockstep in the same direction!” (O’Toole, 2008, p. 2)

This quote brings up a past work experience memory for me. Over a decade ago in a student co-op work term, I recall being in a meeting with multiple teams for a project that I was working on and making an initial discovery that not everyone at my company wanted the same things. I remember feeling mystified on why other teams couldn’t immediately see how the initiative could benefit them directly or, if not them directly, then indirectly by benefitting the company as a whole. However, as O’Toole’s statement implies, it is leaders that lead internal stakeholders to this type of understanding by using clear communication and transparency. I think that I will come back often to this statement throughout my career, especially when I’m leading a project with multiple stakeholders that have varying objectives.

Perspective Shift Quote:

“Digital leadership requires a shift in leadership style from one of mandates, directives and buy-in, to one grounded in empowerment, support and embracement as keys to sustainable change.” (Sheninger, 2014, p. 2)

Throughout my career, I have always sought to unify multidisciplinary teams and often, it has taken creative ways to do so. However, Sheninger’s above statement made me realize that I mostly considered the unification as part of gaining buy-in, instead of empowering, supporting and embracing stakeholders as part of the change (although I think this sometimes happened naturally when trying to gain buy-in). This new perspective will be part of my future leadership approach and I plan to emphasize it more when I am helping to implement a change that will affect multiple people in many ways. Tying into this goal, I agree that digital leaders must give up control and trust others in the change process (Sheninger, 2014). Both of these elements are essential for a digital leadership approach that Sheninger advocates will allow for sustainable change, a concept reinforced by Cormier (2017) as being integral to successful technology changes in education. Therefore, these elements will be implemented into my leadership plan to make them a part of my future practices of leading digital change to learning in an organization.

Change Management

Enforcing Quote:
“Systems theory recognizes that a change in any part of the system creates change throughout the system. If one part of the system changes, other parts must change to accommodate this new system” (Biech, 2007)

When I first read the above quote from Biech (2007), I remembered first learning about systems theory in an undergraduate economics course. As an analytical person both in my personality and formed by past analyst work experience, it is natural for me to consider all the ways that a proposed change affects everyone and everything around me. I liked being reminded about this theory in this course and how it applied to taking a project view of the system as a whole and not focus too much on just its parts. I think this can be challenging as, from my experience, there are some parts of the system you know more than others. I believe this is a main rationale for the importance of building relationships with stakeholders that may have greater knowledge of parts you may not. As a result, systems thinking is integrated within my future leadership plan.

Perspective Shift Quotes:
“Contemporary learning environments are [sic] insufficiently flexible to meet a diverse range of teaching and learning needs” (Feldstein, 2017, para. 3). As of May 2017, Feldstein asserts that multiple projects with proposed systems to solve for this problem have yet to be implemented. He asks: “Nearly a decade and a half after the idea of some kind of modular learning environment surfaced, why hasn’t it happened yet?” (Feldstein, 2017, para. 4).

From my past work experience and discussions within my network, large companies are often striving for all-in-one solutions, a product that can do it all. For example, a main system that can translate accounting reports into required input information for the finance system that then feeds input information to operations. The most common type of product I’ve come across in my career is enterprise software (i.e. SAP software). Feldstein (2017) describes how the demand for a learning management system to have it ‘all’ is exactly what drives bad design that inhibits the flexibility of digital learning environments (DLEs) that the company wants to create. Going forward, as we await the arrival of learning platforms, I don’t want to “contribute to the problem” (Feldstein, 2017, para. 46). Therefore, I will add to my future leadership plan that I will focus on creating flexibility for the user within DLEs.

Digital Learning Environments (DLEs): Planning and Implementation

Enforcing Data & Quote:

Figure 1. Reprinted from “Blended Learning: A Dangerous Idea?”. By P. Moskal, C. Dzuiban and J. Hartman, 2013, The Internet and Higher Education, 18, p. 15–23. Copyright 2012 by Elsevier Inc.

 

“Table 2 shows that only three items on the survey instrument were required to form an effective prediction model. If students assigned an excellent rating to the instructor’s ability to facilitate learning, his or her communication skill, and his or her respect and concern for students, then the probability of their assigning an overall rating of excellent to their learning experience approaches 1.0 (.97).” (Moskal, Dzuiban and Hartman, 2013, p.19)

Using over one million student responses (n=1.28 million) that informed course ratings at University of Central Florida over 2008 to 2011, Moskal, Dziuban and Hartman (2013) found that the three above factors were the most important to focus on for improving the learning environment for a learner. Within a blended learning course, this paper shows that the probability of a learning experience is highly dependent on the facilitator or educator that leads the course, the communication they use and the respect they demonstrate to the learners. This coincides with the factors that I have had my own successes with as a facilitator and corporate educator in corporate learning. This data and finding provides a good reminder for me as a learning designer and developer not only in blended learning, but for online learning as well. Even it was blended learning and not fully online learning data that was used for the above finding, I believe it is relevant in a similar way for online learning. From my experience, learners can only fully engage with an online course if it is able to effectively facilitate their learning, effectively communicate the learning and demonstrate respect for the learner’s skill, knowledge and experience.

Perspective Shift Quote:

“By appreciating factors like power dynamics, competing incentives and cultural norms, innovators can prepare themselves for barriers to change, and find the entrepreneurial routes around them to successfully affect system change.” (Conway, Masters & Thorold, 2017, p. 3)

As a perspective shift for me, I want to integrate the ‘think like a system, act like an entrepreneur’ approach advocated by Conway et al. (2017) in the quote above. I’ve always been an advocate for “developing a deep understanding of the system being targeted for impact” (Conway et al., 2017, p. 3), but within the analysis, I can sometimes get lost or overwhelmed. To reduce overwhelm, the ‘think like a system, act like an entrepreneur’ approach gives me a focus to target; utilizing an entrepreneurial mindset to identify opportunities from the analysis (Conway et al., 2017), rather than just focusing on identifying more problems for the project to tackle. This is a natural way to reduce scope creep as well.

Incorporating Data into Decisions

Enforcing Quote:

“Managing well with analytics does not require a math genius or master of computer science; instead, it requires … being able to separate good data from bad, and knowing where precisely analytics can add value.” (Zettelmeyer, 2005, para. 2)

With six years of experience in data analytics and forecasting, I couldn’t agree more with the above statement. I think an awareness of data science is a good start but knowing how to identify data as worthwhile to underpin a decision is a highly relevant skill. For me, the most enforcing part of Zettelmeyer’s quote is that throughout my experience, I’ve come to a similar conclusion; analytics are only useful when they can create value and if not, they are not insights but rather slick visuals that don’t contribute to the decision-making for the project you are working on.

Perspective Shift Image and Quote:

Figure 2. Reprinted from “Making Sense of Data-Driven Decision Making in Education” by J. Marsh, J. Pane and L. Hamilton, 2006, https://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP170.html. Copyright 2006 by RAND Corporation.

 

“This framework … acknowledges that the presence of raw data does not ensure its use. Rather, once collected, raw data must be organized and combined with an understanding of the situation (i.e., insights regarding explanations of the observed data) through a process of analysis and summarization to yield information. Information becomes actionable knowledge when data users synthesize the information, apply their judgment to prioritize it, and weigh the relative merits of possible solutions. At this point, actionable knowledge can inform different types of decisions” (Marsh, Pane & Hamilton, 2006, p. 3)

This conceptual framework from Marsh et al. (2006) for data-driven decision making (DDDM) in education provides an excellent base to structure data that I encounter in future digital projects into defined categories and outlines a focus on making the information actionable to feed into my decisions.

My Leadership Plan: Envisioning My Future as a Digital Change Leader

Overall, from my learnings taken from this course, I will strive to be more definitive with the leadership, change management, DLE implementation and data approaches for each project I face. In taking a more defined approach, I hope that I can become a more effective digital change leader and that it will result in an increased ability to create more sustainable changes when integrating learning technologies and DLEs within organizations.

To summarize my reflections into a leadership plan, I will focus on the major perspective shift in each LRNT 525 unit that I experienced. Going forward, my digital leadership plan is to:
• Emphasize empowerment, support and embracement in my leadership approach, especially when developing relationships and in interactions with project stakeholders.
• Emphasize creating and implementing DLEs that are as flexible to change as possible.
• Emphasize effective facilitation, communication and respect for learners in learning design.
• Emphasize the creation of actionable knowledge within digital project data by synthesizing it, prioritizing it using my judgement and weighing “the relative merits of possible solutions” (Marsh et al., 2006, p. 3).

References

Biech, E. (2007). Models for change. In thriving through change: A leader’s practical guide to change mastery. Alexandria, VA: ASTD. Retrieved from http://library.books24x7.com .ezproxy.royalroads.ca/toc.aspx?bookid=22651

Conway, R., Masters, J., & Thorold, J., (2017). From design thinking to systems change: How to invest in innovation for social impact. Royal Society of Arts, Action and Research Centre. Retrieved from https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/rsa_from- design-thinking-to-system-change-report.pdf

Cormier, D. (2017, December 8). Our schools aren’t broken, they’re hard. [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2017/12/08/our-schools-aren’t-broken-they’re-hard/

Feldstein, M. (2017, May 28). A flexible, interoperable digital learning platform: Are we there yet? [Blog post]. Retrieved from: https://mfeldstein.com/flexible-interoperable-digital-learning-platform-yet/

From “No Title” by Mohamed Hassan, 2018 (https://pixabay.com/en/writing-writing-about-something-3209899/). In the public domain is licensed under CCO.

Marsh, J., Pane, J., & Hamilton, L., (2006). Marsh, J. A., Pane, J. F., & Hamilton, L. S. (2006). Making sense of data-driven decision making in education. Retrieved from: https://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP170.html

Moskal, P., Dziuban, C., & Hartman, J. (2013). Blended learning: A dangerous idea? The Internet and Higher Education, 18, 15–23. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.12.001

O’Toole, J. (2008). Notes toward a definition of values-based leadership. The Journal of Values-based leadership, 1(1), 10. Retrieved from: http://scholar.valpo.edu/jvbl/vol1/iss1/10

Sheninger, E. (2014). Pillars of digital leadership. International Centre for Leadership in Education. Retrieved from: http://www.leadered.com/pdf/LeadingintheDigitalAge_11.14.pdf

Zettelmeyer, F. (2015). A leader’s guide to data analytics. Kellogg Insight. Retrieved from: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/a-leaders-guide-to-data-analytics/