The Rectorate’s Column
Educational management in a changing educational landscape
Strengthening the strategic educational management will ensure that SDU can manoeuvre in the educational landscape of the future where flexibility, interaction with the surrounding world and collaboration across disciplines are basic conditions.
Over the past month, in connection with the revision of SDU's quality system, I have had meetings with almost all of SDU's heads of department. I have also participated in a workshop on future scenarios at SDUUP. Both have shed light on the importance of educational management, as well as the dilemmas and complexity of it, where the distribution of formal responsibilities, resources and interests does not necessarily go hand in hand, but where good cooperation and mutual respect between actors such as teaching committees, study management, study boards, department management and dean’s offices enable both operations and development while also ensuring high educational quality.
Why worry about educational management when it works just fine? Because we are looking into a changed reality where the educational landscape and the world in which we operate are changing rapidly, whereas our organization is primarily geared to operations and educational development. SDU faces new demands in the future, and therefore we must consider our portfolio of education programmes from a new perspective with new balances, priorities and needs for flexibility, interaction with the surrounding world and development across disciplines. In other words, we need to recalibrate the balance between operations and development – not just educational development, but strategic development of the portfolio of education programmes, and this requires strategic educational management.
SDU's vision is to ‘create value for and with society’. We will achieve this through our core deliverables: Research, education and dissemination. Deliverables of the highest quality, which create the most value when they are well connected. Therefore, it is important for the University to have an overall view of our portfolio of research and education programmes when we make strategic decisions.
SDU will move towards less ordinary full-time education and more learning for people in employment in collaboration and partnerships with employers. There will also be a general need to incorporate a higher degree of flexibility into the development of the education programmes. All of this will apply, for instance, to Master's degree programmes for working professionals, to 45-ECTS supplementary certificates to 75-ECTS Master’s degree programmes or to lifelong learning in one format or another. We will have room for manoeuvre, allowing us to exploit the connections between research, education and dissemination in completely new ways. But this requires us to challenge our usual ways of operating.
SDU has a strong starting point for developing teaching and education across disciplines which we must use to our advantage when collaborating with the surrounding world. I believe that it is necessary to bring several disciplines together in the development of educational programmes when we want to break the mould and deliver uniqueness. At SDU, we have already gained valuable experience in this connection with the development of elements for SDUx, and the results will not be achieved automatically. I believe that strengthened strategic educational management must support SDU in meeting the surrounding world’s ever-increasing need for thinking across traditional disciplines.
We are standing on solid foundations, but together we need to rethink how we organise educational management at a time when the surrounding world and target groups are changing. A strengthened focus on strategic educational management will ensure that key actors such as study boards, heads of studies and heads of department can act in a changing educational landscape, and it will set a direction for the work we do to invent, develop and operate the education programmes of the future.
