Introduction: ICT-driven change in higher education: Learning from e-learning

Early in 2006, drawing greatly upon personal experience, we identified the need for the Higher Education (HE) community to identify and share much more transparently the growth pains of developing institutional e-learning cultures, with all the concomitant challenges of managing consequential organisational transformation. A proposal for a special issue was made to the editors of this journal, which was enthusiastically accepted. The following editorial sets the contemporary context and then identifies the unifying thread and different themes throughout the peer-reviewed contributions. It is often stated that HE is key to creating and supporting the knowledgebased economies of the 21st century but also that the raised expectations are simultaneously under funded by governments (Evaline 2004). Ironically, however, while the sector specialises in creating and imparting knowledge, and while the prevailing expectation is that it must do more with less, our first-hand experience is that HE is often less agile and strategic than its industrial counterparts in applying knowledge or new technologies in response to threats and opportunities within its ecosystem (see Browne et al. 2006). In fact, as Duke (2002) shows, universities are often highly resistant to change. A complicating factor is that HE has a unique set of cultures (see Becher and Trowler 2001) – including the chasm between academic and academic-related staff – which makes it reluctant to learn from accounts set in other sectors. Moreover studying the sector from within is quite nuanced and problematic (see Watson and Maddison 2005). So while published examples of change management and organisational transformation in HE are not abundant, they have become increasingly necessary both to HE itself to and to those interested in studying change in unfamiliar cultures. The papers in this special issue share evidence of and reflections upon projects where universities have demonstrated themselves to be adaptable and responsive to the varied threats and opportunities presented by ICT in general and by e-learning in particular. These reflective case studies complement more prescriptive resources such as those available from the Higher Education Academy (HEA 2006) and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC 2006). However, they also