Learning Resources

Abstract: Statistics demonstrate that our present land use and consumption patterns present the challenge of meeting contemporary needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Higher education has a special obligation to answer this challenge because it plays a role in producing the leaders, policy makers, and citizens of the world, and it uses a large share of resources to do so. To meet this challenge, sustainable practices and paradigms must permeate colleges and universities, from curricula to physical plant to leadership and institutional policies. This overview of the articles in this theme issue discusses methods for incorporating sustainability into higher education across a wide array of institutional realms.

Abstract: Critics of strategic planning question whether it is a useful tool or a counterproductive management fad. This article reviews the experience of a university that has one of higher education’s longest continuous experiences with a strategic planning process and places it in the context of the literature on higher education planning. The article concludes that a long-term commitment to strategic planning—clearly defined in its broad parameters but flexible and adaptive in its details—can be productive.

Abstract: One of the major issues in strategic planning is moving the academic strategic plan from planning to implementation. This article suggests that there are several effective implementation methods: using the budget, using participation, using force, establishing goals and key performance indicators, working within the human resource management system, using the reward system, using faculty and staff development, working with institutional culture, working with or around tradition, developing and using change champions, and building on systems that are ready for or are easily adaptable to strategic change.

Abstract: We tend to ecpect the new technology to promote economic prosperty and a more democratic society. However, there is no evidence that it improves the economic productivity of society as a whole, and neither is it socially inclusive. Higher eduction cannot afford to be a s profligate with its resource as the industrial world has proved to be, but it can support progress. It has the twin responsiblities of (1) achieving the potential of learning technologies for the way it conducts its core business and (2) playing iots role as the engine of a learning society.