ABSTRACT
In writing this final part of Leišytė and Wilkesmann’s book, I am not going to rehearse again or attempt to synthesize the contents of the chapters, which can speak very well for themselves. Instead, I want to reflect a little on some of the broader issues raised by the book in relation to academic staff, universities as organizations, and teaching and learning in higher education. Some of these matters are already addressed by the editors in their introduction, in emphasizing how they want to try to explore both how managers of teaching and learning can influence teaching, learning and academic identities and how teaching and learning initiatives can change organizational structures. But here I want to combine some of the major themes of the book with suggesting how these might be further developed in the future. The five themes in question are the differences between managing and leading teaching, new technologies in teaching and learning and the myth of the student ‘digital native’, the relationship between the changing work and identities of academics and those other university staff who support teaching, how external drivers sometimes force us to do strange things in relation to the quality of teaching (using the example of the 2015 introduction to the UK of a Teaching Excellence Framework), and, finally, possible future alternative organizational structures for higher educational institutions.
