Overview of papers on enhancement of European Higher Education as presented during the Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Rome, October 2016

What is the change strategy required for an academic institution to engage in, in order to leverage new opportunities associated with MOOCs? Over the past five years I was deeply involved in leading and participating in numerous committees, forums, task-forces and discussions at both the university and school level, all aimed at assessing the strategic viability of an online education strategy for our top tier business school.
We were challenged with numerous change management dilemmas from identifying a unique and new educational value that we could offer, to assessing growth potential against product cannibalization risks, learning the actual production process of an effective online experience, identifying faculty that could help lead the school in such new educational direction, securing the right resources and talent required for a top notch MOOC production, and relaxing a traditionalist culture of conservatism, among a few key issues.

We learned that the transition to MOOC based online open education platform is not just about new product development, new value offered, new communication drafted, or different commercialization efforts.

Instead, a careful orchestration of numerous moving parts is needed. Overcoming a culture of education exclusion, and faculty resistance to change, developing a school wide infrastructure of talent, technologies, tools and metrics, securing university wide support, engaging in lean development, and staging a strategic market penetration, are among the change levers identified.

This short paper uses a case based approach to propose a strategic change framework for effective transitioning of the education platform to an open online democratized one.

Keywords

change management · democratized education · online education strategy