mark.drechsler

Developing leaders – when good enough is actually better

August 28, 2019August 31, 2017 by mark.drechsler

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about leadership and succession planning lately, particularly in relation to the well-worn Tom Peters adage that:

Leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders

But as a leader, what are some of the important things you need to do in order to achieve just this? The one I want to touch on today specifically relates to the second dot point in this Forbes article: giving team members the right experience.

What do we mean by the ‘right experience’? Giving them tasks that are challenging but achievable, and then supporting to do those tasks to a standard which is ‘good enough’.

Designing for the Digital Divide

August 28, 2019August 3, 2017 by mark.drechsler

Today saw the release of the 2017 Australian Digital Inclusion Index, which can be downloaded from the ~~Telstra Sales Portal~~ Digital Inclusion website. The report had some positive, although expected, conclusions in that digital inclusion is increasing right across the board, which is the good news. What caught my eye however were the specific mentions of the sociodemographic groups which are the most digitally excluded across the country, specifically:

“…people in low income households, people aged 65+, people with a disability, people who did not complete secondary school, Indigenous Australians, and people not in paid employment.”

Students as partners – moving beyond the customer concept in student services

August 28, 2019June 21, 2017 by mark.drechsler

The debate of whether students are or are not ‘customers’ of their University is a well worn one, so it was of great interest to see this report published today via Universities UK which put the matter to rest once and for all, and the result was…

Changes in the Australian Higher Ed LMS landscape – a wave, or just a ripple?

August 28, 2019May 9, 2017 by mark.drechsler

This week, the University of Sydney announced that it was migrating from Blackboard Learn to Canvas, joining RMIT, UC and the University of Adelaide who have also announced similar moves in the last twelve months. No doubt this is sending one or two quivers through the camps of the ‘Big Three’ LMS platforms which until recently made up the entirety of the incumbent LMS landscape in Australian Higher Ed – Blackboard Learn (21 Universities), Moodle (15) and Brightspace by D2L (3)*.

But are we about to see a wave of change in the LMS landscape across Australia, or will it be more like a ripple?

University marketing – a diversity of sorts

August 28, 2019May 1, 2017 by mark.drechsler

It was Seth Godin who described marketing as a contest for people’s attention, and recently I’ve been pondering the different ways which Universities are attempting to grab the attention of potential students, particularly as the looming Federal budget looks almost certain to increase cost for students. The more students are required to pay for Higher Education, the more seriously many of them will take the choice of course and provider, and for that matter consider whether a Degree is even worth it (as I talked about in my last blog post). This pressure will no doubt have University marketing departments hot-to-trot on making sure that their University’s brand is being represented in the most enticing way possible, but across the 43 accredited Universities in Australia offering a highly regulated (and in many cases some would argue largely indistinguishable) product, how are Universities attempting to differentiate?