EDU683: Successful Leadership in Higher Education Administration

Course Credits:
Course Hours Per Week:

Course Overview

This course explores theories, concepts, and behaviors of effective leadership necessary to address the challenges of organizational change within higher education and training environments. Students investigate a wide range of related topics including:

  • Organizational functioning and culture
  • Models of organizations
  • Leadership theory and strategies that help facilitate change
  • Requisites for sustainable organizational change

In the course project, Organizational Change Plan: Leading a Team Through the Change Process, students lead a small team in proposing or making a change in a higher education institution or corporate training environment. Beginning with an initial assessment of the need for the change, students establish a plan, complete reflections on leadership issues and successes, and plan for long-range assessment of the project.

Course Learning Objectives

  • Describe basic models of organizational functioning and behavior that can be employed to help understand the operation of higher education institutions in an ever-changing society
  • Critically analyze basic differences in ways higher education institutions are organized and how learning organizations are different from other kinds of institutions
  • Describe models and theories of leadership and how they relate to various organizational contexts
  • Critically analyze issues of power, politics and change and their influence on administrative leadership and organizational structure
  • Identify social, cultural, demographic, economic, political, and technological components of the higher education system external environment to determine the most important changes affecting the system over the next decade
  • Use information and concepts about leadership and change in higher education to make leadership decisions within an organizational context
  • Describe how higher education systems are able to react, adapt or influence “change events”
  • Identify leadership positions within a higher education or corporate training setting and describe how those roles function within the organizational whole
  • Develop strategies to assess leadership skills and the ability to facilitate change
  • Create a portfolio-ready professional synthesizing project