Organization and Governance
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) governance incorporates the processes, relationships, and structures via which tertiary education policies both at institutional and national levels are reviewed, implemented and developed. Governance contains a complex web that includes the institutions characteristics, and legislative framework. The governance is also comprised on how these webs are associated to the entire system, how institutions funds are allocated and how the funds are accounted for based on how they are spent. It also comprised of less formal relationships and structures that influence and steer behavior. This paper focuses on defining the best governance that will contain culture and system that can be used to influence the ability of college institution to react to the changing higher education landscape and that can assist in handling future challenges and obstacles in the future. The governance will focus on enhancing the institution’s accountability, looming budget cut, ensure future accreditation, and expand learning to accommodate new technologies.
Institution Description
I will be working as a president in a collegial organization in town. The organization working principle will be enhancing teamwork to ensure effective dissemination of knowledge to the student. This will be a medium sized college containing a total of 2500 students from different parts of the country. The college offers a total of 10 different courses, with both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It contains a total of 110 lecturers who are highly knowledgeable and experienced in teaching, with minimum professional qualification of master degree. The college mission will be offering high quality education that transforms students’ life to achieve a lifetime success in serving, learning, and leading in the society.
Organization and Governance
Collegial organization are strongly normative based which are particularly suitable for colleges and other learning institutions that contain a considerable numbers of skilled staff. It assumes a shared set of values upheld by the organization members. To enhance effective governance in this collegial based institution the governance team will adopt a number of unique characteristics. These characteristic include collaboration in decision making, employment of transformational leadership, descriptive leadership, and participative leadership.
Collaborative Decision Making: The organization will adopt collaborative decision making where decision will be made based on consensus instead of the application of conflict or division. Being a higher institution of learning, the organization has highly educated and intelligent people in the systems, who are highly experienced in their work. In this regard, they can highly assist in providing the necessary require information. Collaborative decision making will highly enhance teamwork among the body of governance where effective research will be done to enhance the process of decision making and governance in the college. The collaboration decision making process will involve the college board of directors, the college senate, deans of schools, and student representatives among others (Brown, 2000).
Transformational leadership: The organization will adopt transformational form of leadership which will play a great chance in transforming the current institutional culture to the new preferred culture. As a president I prefer enhancing a culture that major more on creativity, exploration, and quality enhancement. This can only be enhanced where change is highly embraced. I will nurture a culture where every person strives to improve themselves either as staffs or students. This will include the development of a learning culture where each person aspires to perform better than before.
Institutional framework: The organization will adopt a new institution framework that focuses on descriptive and participative learning. The framework will guide on the rules and regulation that must be followed while operating business in the institution. It will clearly define the roles and duties of each individual in the institution and the protocol that must be followed while performing certain duties. This framework will be highly guided by the governmental requirements of learning collegial organizations in the region. The framework will define the position of the students, teaching staffs, non-teaching staffs, parents, board of governance, management, and external power that influence the institution functions. This will assist in knowing the general operations protocol in the institution (Brown, 2000).
Organization Response to Future Challenges
Accreditation Mandates
There is a growing need for all HEIs in the region to be recognized or credited by the required body of standard. This means that the school must be able to operate under the defined standards and be able to meet the required quality of operations in terms learning facilities provision, tutors level of education, and quality of learning. I will enhance the institution accreditation by employing total quality management (TQM) technique in the institution. This is a form of quality enhancement in organization that has a great history of success in all institutions that it has been employed in the past. As a management philosophy, TQM has been proven to contain convergent validity by manner of consisting of a shared set of practices and assumptions as it is being used in different organizations. This model is focused as representing associations between dimensions of quality. The model can be employed to enhance continuous enhancement in educational institutions irrespective of whether the institution is experiencing any issue or not. It is a never-ending process of improvement of all management systems and people (Kanji et al., 1999). The model will therefore assist in improving the quality of learning and institution management at all time, which provide the institution with a great chance of adhering to the set standards of operation and upholding them all through. This will increase the institution’s chances of being accredited. The application of the model will highly be based by the set forms of standards that the institutions of the region must uphold to ensure a high level of compliance.
Looming Budget Cuts
There is a growing need for the HEIs to reduce their budget to fit the constant reduction of their fund supply from the government. This can highly affect the institution operations in the future. To manage this, I have considered employing strategies to enhance independent means of earning more finances for the institution. This will ensure that the institution survives the looming budget cuts without interfering on quality of operation or straining the students. It will also prevent possible drastic measures that can come as a result of budget cuts such as laying-off workers or eliminating courses that require a lot of learning resources, particularly the science based courses. To resolve all this, I will apply financial autonomy concept which is the freedom to use and raise funds. The government funds are always restricted on their use and thus they cannot be used to own purposes set by the institution to enhance its improvement. Financial autonomy will give this institution a chance to think and employ its own strategies of acquiring funds, which will support it in its general improvement and countering shortages that may be introduced by the future budget cut. The techniques of raising own funds will be decided by the board of governance in collaboration with the college financial department. (Pandey, 2004)
Expanding the Distance Learning Program and Online Support Systems
The HEIs just like all other sectors are experiencing changes with change in technology. The new emerging HEIs are highly embracing the new forms of technology, making it hard for the traditional system to remain viable in the market. The traditionally based HEIs are experiencing stiff competition in the market and for them to keep up to the new set standards; the institutions must be ready to overcome the future challenges. To address the technology challenges, the organization will implement the IT facilities and allow a new learning model that will integrate the traditional classroom with the virtual classroom. The institution will have a traditional classroom for those who prefer it, an integrated classroom for those who prefer studying virtually but meeting their lecturers physically for some clarification, and full virtual classrooms for those who prefer distance learning (Hanna, 1998). This will ensure that we address the needs of all customers in the society. The school will also provide free WI-FI to students in their library and computer laboratories and also in their classroom to enhance learning and research. Digital school library will be established where student will be required to create their portals to be able to access it. This will promote the modern form of learning in the college (Middlehurst, 2010).
Responding to Increasing Demands for Accountability
Accountability is very important in any organization since it enhances effective employment of resources in an organization. There is a growing need of accountability in HEIs in the region, based on the funds provided by the government. Any institution that cannot manage to account for its resources is highly denied the chance of practicing autonomy. In this regard, I will consider employing a high level of accountability in the institution, particularly due to that fact that the organization needs to be autonomous. Accountability refers to measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of the institutions activities. The board of governance will produce guidance on how the organization institution will be utilized in judiciously and economical manner. The governance team will also produce clearly defined initiatives, goals and missions, as well as performance evaluation indicators to guide on the process of accountability in the institution. Financial operations of the institution will also be highly audited on yearly bases and submitted to the government. Annual social reports will also be made to demonstrate the institution contribution to the society. All this will be carefully and professionally done to ensure that academic and institution autonomy is not jeopardized (Pandey, 2004).
Conclusion
A collegial institution president has a great role of enhancing the general success and development of an institution. He or he should be able to define the organization structure of governance that will guide in the accomplishment of the organization goals, missions and objective. A president must therefore have the ability to develop an organization culture that enhances effective operation and that enhances effective facing of future organization challenges. The president in this case focuses on developing collaborative and transformational form of governance with intention of improving the institution’s quality, accountability, technology embracement, and ability to handle future reduction in the budget. This form of governance will enhance descriptive and participative learning, which highly focuses on team work. The main intention of this form of governance is to establish a culture where every individual strives to improve themselves in terms of knowledge, skills, and professionalism.
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