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The immediate financial and operational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education have resulted in short-term responses focused on reducing costs. This has included decreasing the size of the permanent workforce, pausing senior executive pay and replacing face-to-face with online teaching. The impact of these changes on employees who provide education, research and student support has been significant. To enable higher education to respond effectively to future complexity requires a more strategic approach designed to build employees commitment. The extent of change requires a move away from the current control-oriented, individualist and hierarchical administrative management approach that characterises higher education, towards a more collaborative leadership approach. Based on a case study of Australian higher education, the chapter unpacks how, in combination, the elements of an ecological view of leadership, actioned through multiple double-loop feedback based on the six tenets of a distributed leadership approach, can underpin a collaborative leadership approach designed to build employee commitment.

This chapter presents five differentiated models of curriculum, each designed with templates created from learning theories. The discipline of distributed leadership is chosen to develop a cognition-based curriculum, a behavior-based curriculum, a performance-based curriculum, a values-based curriculum, and collectively arranged into a competency-based curriculum. The research literature frames the attributes of a competency-based curriculum on psychological competence.

In this chapter, curricula are developed to demonstrate the process of adapting theories of learning, instruction, and environment into design templates with which to differentiate the dimensions and components of a curriculum. In these curricula, multiple conceptual frameworks are employed to translate the content and structure of the discipline into instructional objectives, instructional engagement, instructional experience, and instructional environment to align the instructional processes with the intended learning. For these demonstrations, the discipline of organizational leadership is chosen due to the multidimensional structure of this discipline and the opportunities it presents to differentiate the curriculum and learning. Each component of the curriculum adapts an appropriate framework to align and interconnect the instructional processes into an optimized learning experience. The result is curricula that have a coherent flow horizontally across the components for each outcome as well as interconnectedness vertically between the outcomes. This approach creates coherence, alignment, and interconnectedness to the curricula and order to the learning process for the learners.

This methodology is applied to design the curriculum for five instructional modules. Module 1 focuses on dualistic thinking developed through a cognition-based curriculum. Module 2 presents a multiplistic learning experience through a behavior-based curriculum. Module 3 presents relativistic learning through a performance-based curriculum. Module 4 delivers complex learning through a values-based curriculum. Module 5 compiles these four modules into a competency-based curriculum model.

Each of these modules employs a unique set of theories to configure the components of the curricula to reflect the structure of each discipline. The use of each theory is explained and demonstrated in the design process.

In this chapter the authors explore what it means to be an inclusive school leader through a discourse that focuses on “out of the box” approaches in preparing future school leaders to push the envelope of inclusive leadership practice. The purpose of this chapter is to (a) define inclusive education and leadership; (b) describe prevailing theoretical frameworks for leadership in inclusive education and build on emerging theories of inclusive psychology and inclusive pedagogy; (c) identify promising practices for leadership in inclusive education; (d) identify emerging understandings of leadership roles in inclusive education; and (e) suggest recommendations for policy, practice, and leadership preparation. In both the USA and the UK, contrasting and polarizing discourses that focus leaders’ attention on attainment and performance for pupils and appear to compete with the leadership role in including (i.e., effectively educating) those students who are known to have achievement gaps (e.g., those with disabilities). Alternative perspectives are offered that frame leadership for inclusive education in terms of broader concepts such as “leadership for learning.”

The search for more effective policies, choice of optimal implementation strategies for achieving defined policy targets (e.g., cost-containment, improved access, and quality healthcare outcomes), and selection among the metrics relevant for assessing health system policy change performance simultaneously pose continuing healthcare sector challenges for many countries of the world. Meanwhile, research on the core drivers of healthcare costs across the health systems of the many countries continues to gain increased momentum as these countries learn among themselves. Consequently, cross-country comparison studies largely focus their interests on the relationship among health expenditures (HCE), GDP, aging demographics, and technology. Using more recent 1980–2014 annual data panel on 34 OECD countries and the panel ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) framework, this study investigates the long- and short-run relationships among aggregate healthcare expenditure, income (GDP per capita or per capita GDP^_HCE), age dependency ratio, and “international co-operation patents” (for capturing the technology effects). Results from the panel ARDL approach and Granger causality tests suggest a long-run relationship among healthcare expenditure and the three major determinants. Findings from the Westerlund test with bootstrapping further corroborate the existence of a long-run relationship among healthcare expenditure and the three core determinants. Interestingly, GDP less health expenditure (GDP^_HCE) is the only short-run driver of HCE. The income elasticity estimates, falling in the 1.16–1.46 range, suggest that the behavior of aggregate healthcare in the 34 OECD countries tends toward those for luxury goods. Finally, through cross-country technology spillover effects, these OECD countries benefit significantly from international investments through technology cooperations resulting in jointly owned patents.

Today, pedagogy does not innovate by proposing new methods but by creating learning conditions conducive to the autonomy of learners. During training, students learn to set goals for acquiring knowledge, control their activity and persevere in the face of difficulties. Innovative teachers favour an integrative approach to human activity to jointly develop the relationship with the learning environment or work environment, the socio-cognitive characteristics of learners and their sense of responsibility for the consequences of action and metacognitive management of the activity.

Learners thus evolve in a learning ecosystem that includes the learner himself and his physical and social environment: his tools available (notepad, tablet, etc.), his resources (procedures, methods, instructions, course materials, notes, documentation, etc.) and his partners who also have some knowledge (pair, teachers, expert network, colleagues, etc.). This ecosystem can be seen as a virtual learning space in which technologies that contribute to learning (hardware, software and network) are used with the aim of fostering interactions between stakeholder and content communities. The knowledge is distributed and accessible through the memory of the learner himself or through his tools, resources or partners. It is therefore in the elaboration of the learning mechanism mobilising all the actors to meet the needs of the learners that the innovation can be efficient and effective.

Within this frame of reference, we propose some reflections from pedagogical practice that can develop the learners’ power to act – Which IT environments are needed for specified actions? What pedagogies need to be implemented using these IT environments? What collaborative and reflective tools are needed for professional and university training? Which methods energise learners’ agentivity in the digital age? Three case studies focussing on these questions will offer some recommendations for innovation in pedagogy.

Bruno Latour, one of the architects of actor-network theory, has now enfolded this approach within a larger project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence – AIME. Framed as an empirical inquiry into the ontological and epistemological conditions of modernity, Latour argues for a radical shift in how “objective truth,” “scientific fact,” and “meaning” are established within the world. In this chapter, I draw on several elements of AIME to illustrate how Latour’s ontology, building on, augmenting and responding to criticisms of actor-network theory, can be used to explore higher education, focussing on one episode derived from a larger ethnography of medical education.