Faculty, Higher Education Leaders and Employers Strategize
When more than 250 faculty and industry leaders gathered for the 2015 Fall Faculty Conference and Northeastern University/Swinburne University of Technology Global Leadership Summit on October 2, 2015, in Boston, they addressed big questions:
- What can higher education and industry do to address the skills gap, characterized by a speaker from the banking field as a “skills sinkhole”?
- Is higher education fully harnessing adaptive, data-driven teaching tools?
- And, how can educators tap their scholarly networks to expand cultural competency in a globalized higher education environment, work more effectively across sectors, and advocate more effectively for those who do not have access to education?
Dr. John LaBrie, Dean of the College of Professional Studies, framed the goal this way:
“This conference and global leadership summit provides the opportunity to further partnerships and celebrate global collaboration. It also affords the chance for everyone to exchange ideas and experiences of complex challenges faced by leaders in global education. This year, we are honored to have our international partners from Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology with us as we mark the second collaboration on a Global Leadership Summit, which began in Melbourne in 2014.”
After a morning of plenary panels and the keynote entitled “Faculty Leadership for Advancing Teaching, Learning and Collaboration Across Borders” by Martha Kanter, former Undersecretary for Education, U.S. Department of Education, Distinguished Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow, New York University, Steinhardt School of Education and Human Development, participants had their choice of more than 20 talks and workshops, followed by more than 25 poster sessions. Talks included:
- “Personalizing Competencies: Helping Students Envision and Reflect upon the Demands of their Professional Futures”
- “Innovative Models for Faculty Work: Faculty Successfully Navigating Virtual Instruction”
- “Do We Educate to Prepare for the Work Environment or Educate the Next Work Environment?”
And the lineup included the talk “Leading Higher Education Institutes through the ‘Actual-Virtual’ Dichotomy: Some Insights from the Australian Higher Education Context” presented by leaders from Swinburne University of Technology of Melbourne, Australia, and partner with Northeastern University in jointly offering the Master’s in Global Leadership.
Michael Gilding, Executive Dean, Faculty of Business and Law, Swinburne University of Technology, noted, “The joint summit was both a celebration of our partnership and a vehicle to extend it. In the course of the day there were many opportunities for exploring possible joint programs, whereby students from Northeastern University and Swinburne University of Technology can experience an outstanding international education directed toward employment outcomes.”
Conference materials are available on Faculty Central.