Applying leadership Theories to Distance Education Leadership #Lead2013

Summary of my reading of the paper:

Applying Leadership Theories to Distance Education Leadership

by John Nworie, Kent State University

The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership theories that  could be beneficial to distance education leaders.

Transformational leaders are charismatic, motivational, intellectual, and considerate and often display the qualities of self-confidence, honesty, and integrity (Bass & Steidelmeier, 1998; Dixon, 1998).  

 

Transformational leadership have sought to 

  understand how leaders develop and sustain vision, 

  empower instead of manipulate followers, 

  perceive the importance of organizational contexts, and 

  create a cultural environment (Avolio and Bass, 1991; Bass, 1997; Schein, 1992).  

According to Portugal (2006) DE leaders must be transformational leaders and innovative visionaries with the ability to motivate, energize, inspire, and encourage followers.. 

The situational leadership theory proposes that effective leaders play the roles of leadership and management  

Situational leadership attributes are relevant to management of rapid environmental change that involves varied cadre of staff members.

Complexity leadership theory introduces a new dimension to how leadership is perceived as it shifts focus from the individual leader to the context, a shift which influences the performance of the leader and on outcomes.

This method encourages collaboration, flexibility, systems thinking, reflection, innovative solutions, and adaptability of organizational structures 

Intelligent assessment

http://www.intelligentassessment.com/index3.htm

I was in a webinar about the the Intelligent Assessment, about online assessment tool. This tool is used for short answer questions. The most interesting component was that it is capable of gathering facts from the students answers to build its knowledge base. However, setting up the question and feedback takes time. Once it is set up marking seems to be much more easier compared to human manual marking.

The interesting evidence was provided about human error and capabilities of this automated system with different rules to mark short answer questions. The system was linked to a LMS and currently it is available with Moodle.

More information can be found in Sally's Blog: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/SallyJordan/
 

OERs

OERs

OERs are always interesting. OERs provides an opportunity to use pre-created learning resources. Sometimes it could be only part of the resource that we will need. However, rather than re-inventing it is good to re-use and be sustainable.

With ocTEL the following links were provided as some interesting OER resource hubs.

• Jorum
• Merlot
• LearnHigher
• Higher Education Academy – Resources Centre
• Open University – OpenLearn
• Re:Source (Further Education orientated)

Jorum and Merlot has been around for sometime, and I have used resource from these two hubs in the past. 

Learning Theories #ocTEL

As we all know there are many learning theories, and often we can find loads of articles about each of these theories and what it does.


www.learning-theories.com/ was introduced through week 3 learning resources of ocTEL and it provides the summary of many of the learning theories that we have come across so far. It provides the summary paradigm and the model.