Chapter 7

Digital Leadership in Education

Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

1. Introduction
The pace of change in technology, the rising expectations of customers, and the
number of digital companies entering the market to address gaps in customer
expectations have all begun to influence the nature of the leadership needed in the
digital age. Large service organizations, such as those in health care, education,
and government, have started to recognize the impact of the digital age dynamic
on their customers (e.g., patients, students, and citizens). They have started to
explore opportunities to innovate to meet changing customer expectations. In
this chapter, our focus is on the expectations of students in the digital age and
the impact of these expectations on the strategies that higher educational institu-
tions need to employ by leveraging information and communication technologies
(ICT). Note that higher educational institutions also have other stakeholders,
such as teachers, employers, government, and alumni. ICT can be leveraged to
address the needs of these stakeholders as well, but the focus in this chapter is on
students as “consumers.”
Students’ expectations of technology use in educational settings are influenced
by their use of the same technologies when they purchase other products and
services in the commercial marketplace. They prefer to use digital tools, such as
smart phones and apps, to connect with other students, and they use social media
to communicate and share information. As newer technologies improve access to
information using search engines and provide services on demand using wireless
access to connected devices, the challenge for educational institutions is how best
to leverage student interest in technology to help support their reading, participat-
ing, learning, and working together as teams. With the volatility in student demand
for such on-demand services and the availability of options (e.g., online programs,
remote access to learning tools, learning management systems to support team
work, etc.), higher educational institutions will continue to have the following
challenge: How can they best fulfill their academic goals in the digital age?

Effective Leadership for Overcoming ICT Challenges in Higher Education:

What Faculty, Staff and Administrators Can Do to Thrive Amidst the Chaos, 73–91
Copyright © 2021 by Emerald Publishing Limited
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74    Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

Educational institutions have a dual mission: support students’ learning goals

while they are in the institution and tailor their internal processes (or pedagogy)
to help prepare students to sustain their learning competencies as they enter the
volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Cocreating value
with customers and continually learning about customers’ perceived value-in-
use (post-purchase) in creating new value is the essence of service innovation
(Vargo & Lusch, 2008) in today’s knowledge economy. Such service innovation is a
key to supporting the dual mission of educational institutions. Digital leadership is
the enabling leadership that allows organizations to innovate and explore such new
value creation by leveraging advanced technologies (Tanniru, Khuntia, & Weiner,
2018). This chapter proposes the strategies that an educational institution might
employ to demonstrate digital leadership.
The chapter is organized as follows. The next section will use prior research on
several learning theories (Active Learning, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Experiential
Learning) to develop a knowledge framework. The third section uses this
framework to illustrate how advanced ICT may provide opportunities to develop
digital services to address the dual mission of educational institutions. The fourth
section illustrates the use of one technology, online discussion forums, to support
academic learning and another technology, artificial intelligence (AI)/natural
language processing (NLP), to tailor the learning to adapt and create new value.
The last section provides some concluding comments.

2. A Knowledge Framework to Support Learning

Learning, the process of acquiring new knowledge or modifying and reinforcing
existing knowledge, often involves synthesizing different types of information.
Learning is contextual. It builds upon and is shaped by what we already know.
It is also a dynamic process. More than building a passive repository of factual
and procedural knowledge, it involves a cognitive restructuring to connect prior
knowledge within the context of new knowledge. Such an introspection calls for
learners to do things or play different roles so that they can challenge underly-
ing assumptions as they learn new concepts (Wells, 2007). Articulating an idea
or thought and engaging in discussion or argumentation are shown to provide
opportunities for reflection and learning (Vygotsky, 1986; Wink & Putney, 2002).
This is especially true when learners with experience or diverse backgrounds are
brought together to support learning and knowledge retention (Illeris, 2004;
Ormrod, 2012).
Active learning theory (Armstrong, 2010; Marzano, 1991; McKinney, 2010)
brings together several learning activities in support of knowledge generation and
retention, including class discussion, listening and reacting, short written exer-
cises in support of collaborative learning as a group, etc., during the first phase of
their learning. Student debate, simulated games, learning by teaching, and many
other methods support higher order learning. Learning models must support stu-
dents’ acquisition and retention of knowledge, and some of these activities can
be aligned with the students’ maturity in their ability to share and contribute to
knowledge. Using a revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning (Krathwohl,
 Digital Leadership in Education    75

Fig. 1.  Learning Stages: First- to Second-order Learning

(Factual Knowledge to Critical Thinking).

2002), some of these activities are considered knowledge processes that will help
a learner remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create as shown in
Fig. 1. Also, the cognitive processes in the early phases are to learn the knowledge
of chosen disciplines using many traditional techniques of recollection and appli-
cation of a number of simulated cases in class discussions.
David A. Kolb (Kolb, 1984; Smith, 2010), as part of Experiential Learning
theory, discusses four different steps to learning: concrete experience, abstract
conceptualization, reflective observation, and active experimentation (see
Fig. 2). All four of these steps are considered essential for learning. Learners
should have an opportunity to actively experiment (put their knowledge to work)
and get concrete experiences from case studies and projects, either simulated or
in the real world. Repeating such experiences should lead to reflective observa-
tion on what worked or did not work and why, and this will help leaners develop
a conceptualization of processes/practices that are critical to consider in future
experiments. Both academic institutions and business mentors can play a role in
supporting a learner’s reflective observation and abstraction, with the expectation
that learners will develop these skills over time and with experience.
Bloom’s taxonomy views the iterative process of Kolb as helping a learner
acquire four types of knowledge: factual, conceptual, procedural, and meta-­
cognitive (as shown in Fig. 3). If a learner is “doing” various activities to acquire
and retain knowledge, then the knowledge acquired should enable a learner to
move from the factual to the meta-cognitive state. This will help learners deal

Fig. 2.  David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model (ELM).

76    Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

Fig. 3.  Knowledge Framework to Integrate Active and

Experiential Learnings.

with VUCA environment and adapt their decision processes. The challenge for
academic institutions is how tightly academic preparation and experiential learn-
ing (i.e., learning by doing) should be combined to support deeper learning and
adaption. Such a preparation has to support a learner’s capability to

⦁⦁ Analyze concrete experience (positive or negative) from an experiment

(e.g., project or task) they have completed.
⦁⦁ Reflectively note on how this experience differs from prior experiences (e.g., prior
project knowledge).
⦁⦁ Gain new knowledge through abstraction and generalization, when appropriate,
from cumulative experiences.
⦁⦁ Engage in new experiments (e.g., new and more complex projects) with increased
confidence.

Academic institutions that try to use field projects, internships/co-ops, etc., as

experiential learning initiatives often provide learners with a glimpse of decisions
made in VUCA environments. While such experiential learning activities are
useful, the degree to which they can yield fruitful results depends on the depth
of knowledge acquired and applied to varying contexts. Such a deepening of
knowledge and its application to different problem contexts must allow a learner
to engage in reflective observation from each of their prior efforts in decision-
making and support their ability to abstract and generalize. Such reflection can
come from not one but multiple external internship opportunities or multiple
internal discussions using case studies and simulated environments, each providing
opportunities and incentives to experience deeper learning, while still allowing the
learner to have control over what they learn and how they learn. The combination
 Digital Leadership in Education    77

of learning and experiential learning theories and Bloom’s taxonomy leads to a

revision of the activities in each of the four quadrants, as shown in Fig. 3.

3. The Role of Technology in Support of Learning

The learning theories discussed in the previous section provide higher educational
institutions with opportunities to both address the opportunities for service inno-
vation using digital services by leveraging technologies and to adapt these services
to continue to create value as institutions learn from value-in-use (i.e., how well
students are learning). Before we discuss the role of technologies in supporting
learning, let us categorize academic goals as shown in Fig. 4. First-order learning
focuses on core disciplinary knowledge (Q1), and second-order learning focuses
on social and communication skills (e.g., critical thinking, teamwork, etc.) (Q2).
These are put into practice in experiential settings, simulated or real, in Q3 and
Q4 so they support second-order learning that is both experiential and deeper (or
in-depth).
It is useful to note, however, that students can use the repeated application
of disciplinary knowledge in multiple practical or simulated settings to gain in-
depth knowledge in their discipline (Q1–Q3). Similarly, the repeated application
of higher-level knowledge in critical thinking and teamwork can help students
broaden their ability to cope with capabilities in VUCA environments (Q2–Q4).
Transitioning from Q3 to Q4 is what is often referred to as moving from deeper
functional knowledge to broader cross-functional knowledge (i.e., gaining T-skills
that focus on moving from depth to breadth).
With the growing use of the technology to support student learning, as we
will discuss in the rest of this section, institutions have an opportunity to collect
the knowledge accumulated from students and teachers from each quadrant and

Fig. 4.  Knowledge Transitions and Adaptation to Sustain Learning.

78    Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

use analytics engines to learn and adapt the teaching pedagogy or administrative
mechanisms to support learning both inside and outside a classroom setting. The
rest of the section looks at digital service opportunities within each quadrant.
The next section (Section 4) focuses on one platform used to accumulate knowl-
edge in support of such adaptation.
While the early use of internships and projects with nearby companies has
been the practice to support second-order learning, students now have the abil-
ity to use virtual communication tools to connect with students far and wide to
engage in real world or self-developed projects and gain wider exposure to issues
and challenges. In addition, learning systems allow students from multiple insti-
tutions to work online on projects as teams and experience some of the cultural
and geographical challenges and explore ethical issues when political and social
considerations are brought into the picture.
Independent of the way technology is being used to support learning, the
goal of educational institutions is still to focus on the knowledge acquisition and
retention of the learner, moderated by the learner’s maturity level (e.g., early stage
undergraduate to postgraduate student or students with experience). These are
the learning activities along the x-axis of Fig. 4. However, there has been a signifi-
cant debate, intensifying recently, about learners’ capability to meet today’s chal-
lenges. Competitive and global markets and changing customer expectations are
challenging a learner’s capability to not only acquire relevant knowledge but also
adapt it to varying situations to be effective. Environmental uncertainties make it
difficult to decide which factors influence a decision and what knowledge about
these factors is needed to reduce this uncertainty. This calls for the use multiple
external stakeholders (employees, mentors, alumni, etc.) to provide experiential
learning opportunities for students to see or simulate the real world (activities
on the y-axis of Fig. 4). The goal in this section is to leverage technologies that
students, as customers in today’s marketplace, use to provide both basic as well as
other skills – critical thinking and experiential learning.

3.1 Technology in Support of Student Learning in Q1

In theories of knowledge absorption, distinct learning styles – feeling, watching,
thinking and doing, and playing a role (Marzano, 1991) – can be matched to vari-
ous teaching methods in support of knowledge absorption. These theories may
be particularly relevant to building learning models for millennials, as they rely
on significant visual and social media interactions to learn. With the expanded
role of globalization and the need for students to explore cultural, ethical, and
geographical challenges, factual and conceptual knowledge needs to be combined
with actual experimentation and concrete experience.
The internet, web-based communications, and Web 2.0 have become the pri-
mary sources of technology support for first-order learning. Some basic tech-
nologies include the use of online courses in math and other subjects from sites
such as Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org, accessed on November 7, 2019),
at no cost to anyone with Internet access, and web-based frameworks that allow
students to ask questions and get clarification quickly from instructors. The use
 Digital Leadership in Education    79

of (semi) threaded discourse, chat discussions, reviews on concepts presented,

or frequently asked question (FAQ) pages can also provide needed information
on-demand to reinforce student learning. Besides using the Internet to gather
information, other ways to support first-order learning include the use of texts/
alerts to send reminders and share short messages and the use of social media to
communicate information, share experiences, and ask questions.
Given the rapid pace with which these technologies are changing to support
communication and the sharing of experiences, institutions may need to continue
to adapt their in-class or online teaching with technologies that provide short
quizzes for feedback and allow students to ask questions online and react to short
case scenarios with their reviews and comments. Students may be formed into
virtual groups and use social media to engage in some structured activities and
critique solutions provided with “likes.” In summary, many of the learning meth-
ods in the early stages of student learning (Q1) are discipline focused and may
benefit from online or mobile-based activities. Several large classes use “clickers”
to get immediate feedback on certain concepts and correct any misconceptions.

3.2 Technology in Support of Student Learning in Q2

Competencies such as adapting knowledge to changing situations, thinking criti-
cally and seeking the right knowledge for analysis and synthesis, communicating
effectively, working in teams and leading, etc., are learned in two different ways.
As discussed in Fig. 4, group discussions, leading projects, and written and oral
presentations are important ways to provide students with opportunities to sup-
port critical thinking skills. Today, many institutions use learning management
systems to engage students in team projects, edit documents, and even make vir-
tual presentations. They also allow remote access to knowledge resources, such as
external speakers and live debates.
Within university settings, mentorship has shown success in helping advanced
students support high-anxiety students (Rodger & Tremlbay, 2003) and increas-
ing student satisfaction with their university (Sanchez, Bauer, & Paronto, 2006).
One study analyzed the effectiveness of reciprocal tutoring (RPT). It found the
RPT program to be slightly more successful than traditional one-way tutoring,
however both groups of tutored students performed much higher than un-tutored
students (Dioso-Henson, 2012). Similar success was demonstrated in mentorship
programs focused on career and professional development for students in the
same academic program (Glass & Walter, 2000).
Cavallaro and Tan (2006) found that students involved in an online mentor-
ship program (Computer-mediated mentoring) were very motivated and produced
high quality work. A later study investigated the success of online tutoring for
children with low-socioeconomic status. It found that these students improved
their literacy skills when they received feedback from a computer tutor regard-
ing their responses (Kegel & Bus, 2012). A similar study on UK students, aged
16–18, showed that live web-based math tutoring was a convenient way to meet
young tech-savvy people in their natural habitat. It also cut costs associated with
in-person tutoring groups, yet it indicated that such virtual methods depended
80    Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

on student motivation (Lissaman, de Pomerai, & Tripconey, 2009). The synchronous

math-tutoring program, studied in Lissaman et al. (2009), had students and tutors
meet online at the same time, but other studies have also shown that asynchronous
online tutoring, such as an online discussion forum, were beneficial. Other online
tutoring programs have been studied with comparably successful results in English
training (Kao, 2010).
Oakland University (OU) explored the use of a computer-aided mentoring
program in the fall of 2012. It used a partnership with the Nav-Jeevan School in
India and relied on Khan Academy’s free online, self-paced math instructional
videos to educate students. Using both teachers at the school and several stu-
dent volunteers from OU who acted as mentors, along with simple technologies
such as a technology center with 17 computers, Internet connection, and friendly
communication like Teamviewer, allowed students and mentors to engage in dis-
ciplinary and service learning. In addition to select face-to-face mentoring, men-
tees used multiple venues (e.g., via Skype, Google Hangout, and asynchronous
communication) (Tanniru, Eveslage, Ellis, & Turaka, 2013). This flexibility can
encourage greater participation not only by mentors that can meet the students
face-to-face, but anyone interested in volunteering as a mentor (including those
outside the university, such as community partners, alumni, etc.), thus enhancing
the size of the mentoring pool.
In summary, besides multiple team and group assignments, mentorship among
student populations from diverse backgrounds (including those from the US,
UK, the Netherlands, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Africa1) has been studied.
Peer-to-peer mentorship is shown to provide opportunities for students to inter-
nalize and gain an understanding about how learning can vary among those they
interact with across time, space, social, economic, language, and cultural barriers.
This better prepares them for a globally competitive marketplace.

3.3 Technology to Support Experiential Learning in Q3

Learners also need a real-world context where questions can be asked, assump-
tions challenged, risks assessed, etc. Given the amount of abundant and irrel-
evant information, learners need to have the ability to interact with mentors and
other experts to identify important information and work remotely on projects,
often supervised by others. Today, many online project management tools are
available to create opportunities for students to gain the experiential learning that
they need to engage in real world projects or projects that simulate a situation that
is as close to reality as feasible. While some programs were developed for repeated
exposure to experiential learning in unique ways, others leverage service-learning
opportunities to provide similar types of experiences (see Appendix).
Service learning and applied learning have been shown to improve student
academic success and increase retention. A study by the Higher Education
Research Institute at the University of California found university student service

1
See Underhill and McDonald (2010).
 Digital Leadership in Education    81

participation highly affected positive outcomes in 11 areas, such as academic

­performance (GPA, writing skills, critical thinking skills), values (commitment to
activism and promoting racial understanding), self-efficacy, leadership, and plans
to continue participating in service after college (Astin, Vogelgesang, Ikeda, & Yee,
2000). “You’re not just studying to take a test … you’re learning, and the experi-
ences we have are staying with us” (p. 1), said a student quoted in Eyler and Giles’
(1999) book.
In summary, these opportunities provide students with the ability to use many
automated tools for audio and video conferencing and project management to
work and learn in today’s complex environmental settings where digitization
and globalization compound the way people communicate, share, and engage in
problem-solving. Of course, the biggest challenge for institutions is how best to
capture student learning when it is occurring outside their institutional ICT.

3.4 Technology to Capture In-depth Learning in Q4

Learning management systems have become a de facto standard in many higher
education settings to support student learning, and they indirectly capture a sig-
nificant part of the knowledge activities of both students and teachers. Even when
students use external settings to engage in experiential learning, these systems can
be used to assign teams to these projects and capture their project reports and
de-briefing sessions. Specifically, online discussion forums and chained discus-
sions on specific topics or answers to a question have become a key to many of
the activities of students to engage to support critical thinking. In fact, discussion
forums become an important way to assess student engagement and participation
in many senior level and graduate classes to improve critical thinking.
The online forum represents one of the most powerful and popular tools
(Mora, Pont, Casado, & Iglesias, 2015) and is a frequently used communication
technology tool in education. Online forums provide an excellent platform for
learning and connecting students to the subject. They increase student engage-
ment in the subject, promote deep learning, and maintain motivation (Onah,
Sinclair, Boyatt, & Foss, 2014). Such platforms are shown to increase student
motivation and the creation of collective intelligence (De Azevedo & Borges,
2015; Masud, 2015; Mora-Mora, Signes-Pont, & Casado, 2014). This continu-
ous development of web possibilities enhances the teaching–learning process and
increases the effectiveness of learning systems in the knowledge society (Lytras
et al., 2015; Mahmoud, Azaiez, Bettahar, & Gargouri, 2019). However, the chal-
lenge they present is related to the task of managing the huge number of messages
that are generated (Lentell & O’Rourke, 2004), leading to topics becoming frag-
mented over many threads with no search facilities to discover relevant informa-
tion (Onah et al., 2014).
No matter what technology is used, it is designed to capture knowledge in
support of learning using many online frameworks such as Open and Distance
Learning (ODL) (UNESCO, 2002). The ODL platforms are mainly implemented
as online web frameworks for education, and therefore they provide all the facili-
ties for integrating the services used in the educational environment. These tools
82    Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

allow collaboration among all participants, improving interaction. Developing a

web-based collaborative framework allows users to share information and take
advantage of the interactions of other users.
In summary, many terms are used to discuss the role of technology in sup-
porting learning: e-learning, m-learning, u-learning (ubiquitous learning based
on learning environments that can be accessed in different contexts and situa-
tions, mainly via mobile devices), social learning (learning as a cognitive process
that takes place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or
by direct instruction), collaborative learning, or learning in massive open online
course (MOOC) environments. However, digital leadership calls for recogniz-
ing that the methods of learning used must be tailored to the student context.
Leadership must continue to learn from the knowledge captured by the system to
improve the way it addresses the needs of students in today’s VUCA environment.
The next section focuses on one particular approach to support this learning and
the adaptation of value created.

4. Platforms to Capture Knowledge on Learning for

Analytics and Insight
In general, discussion forums as a platform are used to capture knowledge of stu-
dent learning. They are much richer than other (semi) threaded discourses, like
chat discussions, product reviews, or FAQ pages. The goal of these forums is to
connect students asynchronously and engage students in collaborative learning and
improve knowledge management and teaching in the learning process. Discussion
forum analysis in educational environments is divided into two main research areas:
(a) studies on forum structure, user interactions, and types of student and teacher
interventions; and (b) studies focused on the content analysis of messages.
With regard to structure, user interaction, and type of interventions, research
has focused on understanding how students and teachers are using the forums
and the degree to which they met learning and training expectations (Shea &
Bidjerano, 2009). It has also focused on comparing instructor and student par-
ticipation rates by reviewing the role of the instructors and analyzing interactivity
to derive the learning outcomes and interaction patterns (De Laat, Lally, Lip-
ponen, & Simon, 2007; Onah et al., 2014; Suh & Lee, 2006). Suh and Lee (2006)
and Swan et al. (2000) provided qualitative and quantitative measures to find key
terms that make courses more attractive and better managed, and Baxter and
Haycock (2014) and Yang, Sinha, Adamson, and Rosé (2013) show how partici-
pation and interaction in discussion groups encourages student motivation. Per-
formance is covered by Romero, López, Luna, and Ventura (2013), and indicators
to predict the dropout rate in online courses and withdrawal from communities
are presented by Yang et al. (2013).
The second set of studies focused on message content analysis to understand
how information searches have met learning or teaching objectives. The research
here has focused on a forum’s influence on student behavior and academic perfor-
mance (Liu, Cheng, & Lin, 2013) based on forum posts on questions, errors, and
discussion about course material and organization. According to several analysis
 Digital Leadership in Education    83

schemes provided by De Wever, Schellens, Valcke, and Van Keer (2006), there is
a wide variety of work related to content analysis of forum posts. The majority
explored the effectiveness of online forums as platforms for innovating the edu-
cational practices of teachers (Chávez, Montaño, & Barrera, 2016) facilitating
the teaching process (Brace-Govan, 2003), and providing indicators of student
learning that can assist in student assessment (Dennen, 2008; McKenzie & Mur-
phy, 2000; Premagowrie, Kalai, & Ho, 2014). The information provided teachers
and forum administrators with an indication of how to use these forums to sup-
port critical thinking skills and assess individual learning, as well as help manage
online courses and design learning strategies (Guzdial & Turns, 2000).
According to Hoogeveen, Wang, Baldwin, and Verspoor (2018), discussion forum
research can be divided into two main groups: community question-answering
(CQA) archives and discussion forums. Both groups promote community interaction
and information sharing. CQA archives are intended to assist people with problem-
solving and question answering (QA). As soon as someone posts a good answer to a
new question, the interaction is considered to be finished. Discussion forums, on the
other hand, are designed as a platform for discussion. The distinction between CQA
archives and discussion forums is not very clear, as some discussion forums also focus
on answering questions (for instance, Linux Questions – http://www.linuxquestions.
org/. Accessed on October 20, 2019), and specific CQA archives contain questions
that are indeed conversations (for instance, Yahoo! Answers – https://answers.yahoo.
com/. Accessed on October 20, 2019).
In summary, while forums capture knowledge that can be used to improve
student learning and tailor teaching to support this learning, the challenge is one
of having the tools to analyze this knowledge content quickly and effectively.
AI approaches based on NLP tools can offer value in this regard. The goal of
these tools is to make assimilation of the content and course tracking easier for
students and help teachers manage the learning platforms, especially in online
courses – MOOCs and those that call for collaborative learning (Abri, Jamoussi,
Kraiem, & Khanjari, 2017) – which use online forums. The rest of this section will
briefly discuss the role of an analytics engines in support of learning adaptation.

4.1 Analytics Engines

The search for information from the discussion forums is very time consuming.
This specific problem has been dealt with other research, especially those related to
online platforms directed toward large population groups, such as generic forums
(i.e., StackOverflow and Quora) or MOOCs (Ramesh, Goldwasser, Huang,
Daume, & Getoor, 2014). As presented in the work of Peral, Ferrández, Mora,
Gil, and Kauffmann (2019), we propose a set of analytical techniques (combining
AI and NLP) and a general architecture that solve the main open issues found in
the-state-of-the-art methods for managing online forums:

1. efficient tracking and monitoring of forums;

2. accurate information search; and
3. extraction of relevant performance indicators.
84    Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

Our research focuses on the use of AI approaches based on NLP to manage ODL
learning platforms, and specifically online forums, by teachers and administra-
tors. Online forums have a high impact on knowledge transferred among students
(Baxter & Haycock, 2014; Mora, Ferrández, Gil, & Peral, 2017), but no effec-
tive solutions have been proposed to facilitate the automatic monitoring of these
online forums to turn them into a good tool for interaction and communication,
especially when excessive messaging occurs in a disorderly and unstructured man-
ner. The issues being addressed include finding appropriate answers in the forums
to questions (question and answer searches in CQA) and determining when to
create a new thread for discussion in the forum.
Some of the challenges the tool must consider include (a) the existence of irrel-
evant material; (b) data that contains a lot of noise making it difficult to retrieve
relevant material; (c) informal use of language; and (d) spelling and grammati-
cal errors. Also, there is a high computational cost involved in processing large
amount of data, and there are inefficiencies in small and specific data sets. Fur-
thermore, one must consider extracting the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
of educational institutions, such as participation, motivation, dropout rates,
and performance of students. In addition, it is necessary to identify similarities
between questions so that similar questions can be grouped and used to detect
common problems in students’ learning. This helps teachers and administrators
determine how well students are developing critical thinking skills and if learning
is actually taking place.
Using a set of learning analytics techniques based on NLP, a set of automatic
analysis tools are being designed to facilitate the monitoring of online learning
communities. The NLP techniques considered focused on lexical, syntactic, and
semantic analysis, ellipsis and anaphora resolution, information retrieval (IR),
QA, and clustering, as well as data management procedures used to infer the
KPIs.
The proposed general architecture presents two phases, offline and online. The
offline phase of processing the forums is carried out before the online execution.
The forums are pre-processed using the NLP techniques (lexical, syntactic and
semantic analysis; and ellipsis and anaphora resolution). After that, the process
of indexing is performed – similar to IR or QA systems – in which the infor-
mation in the collected forums is organized for easier access in the information
search process. Given the highly dynamic nature of online forums, the indexation
techniques must be robust, especially for incremental and update processes.
With regard to lexical-morphological analysis, it consists of carrying out the
Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging of the text. The output is a set of pairs <word,
PoS tag>, where the PoS tag identifies the grammatical category (noun, verb,
adjective, adverb, conjunction, etc.) and the morphological information (singu-
lar, plural, masculine, feminine, etc.) of the word. FreeLing PoS tagger (Padró &
Stanilovsky, 2012) or TreeTagger (Schmid, 1994) tools could be used for this task.
The syntactic analysis stage consists of performing the parsing of the text.
Full or partial (shallow) parsing of the text can be carried out. In the proposed
architecture, the text is partially parsed to extract only noun phrases (NP), prep-
ositional phrases (PP), and verbal phrases. These phrases represent the “main
 Digital Leadership in Education    85

concepts” involved in the text. The text chunks not included in these phrases are
skipped in the parsing. By contrast, NPs can have nested structures such as PPs,
appositions, or relative clauses; therefore, these phrases are fully parsed. Moreo-
ver, coordinated NPs and PPs are parsed. The objective is to extract the rep-
resentative concepts of each sentence and find out their syntactic function. We
have used the partial parser presented in the work of Ferrández, Palomar, and
Moreno (1999). Among other parsers, different parsing services offered by FreeL-
ing library (such as chart-based shallow parsing or statistical dependency pars-
ing) may be carried out in this stage.
The objective of the semantic analysis stage is to enrich the text with semantic
information (in addition to the lexical and syntactic information). It is obtained
from additional semantic resources, such as WordNet (http://wordnetweb.prince-
ton.edu/perl/webwn. Accessed on January 4, 2020). Each noun, verb, adjective,
and adverb is labeled with its synset (number that identifies a set of synonyms
that represent the same semantic concept) and its type. For instance, the first
sense of plant (plant #1) has the synset number 03963198, belongs to the type
noun.artifact and expresses “buildings for carrying on industrial labor.” In this
way, semantic comparisons between different concepts can be done using the syn-
onymy or hyponym/hypernym chains. Furthermore, Word Sense Disambiguation
techniques must be applied to identify the meaning of words in context: the cor-
rect word synset according to the surrounding words (Navigli, 2009).
The final stage of the offline indexation process is linguistic phenomena resolu-
tion (such as ellipsis or anaphora resolution) to resolve the referential ambiguity
of the text. For this purpose, the anaphoric expressions and elided elements are
resolved and replaced by the entities to which they refer. With linguistic phenom-
ena resolution, the comprehension and coherence of the text are improved when
the omitted elements are replaced by the entities/concepts to which they refer.
The output of the offline phase is the meaning data structure, with lexical, syn-
tactic, and semantic information that unambiguously (including the resolution
of linguistic phenomena) represents the meaning of the text. It will be used for
communication between the different modules of the architecture.
The online process refers to the interaction with the user. The system offers
three main functionalities: navigation, information search, and KPI extraction.
The navigating function consists in being able to browse automatically the struc-
ture of the forum generated by the application. Clustering techniques could be
used (Mora et al., 2017). With regard to information search for questions and
answers, the traditional format of a general-purpose search engine (QA system)
is used, in which the user makes a request for information, and the system pre-
sents the most relevant results. These results may include questions similar to user
request (for a broader generation of the request) or a most likely answer to the
specific user request or the generalized request.
Finally, the functionality of KPI inference will report different KPIs extracted
from the forums, which is especially useful for teachers and administrators of
the ODL platform. The results will be presented through dashboards. Indicators
that express participation, motivation, achievement, and the student drop-out
rate are very useful for managing online courses and designing learning strategies.
86    Mohan Tanniru and Jesús Peral

The method presented in the work of Peral, Maté, and Marco (2017) for the
identification of relevant KPIs, which has been evaluated in an educational con-
text, could be used for this module. The authors presented in their case study
identified indicators obtained in a generic way, which may be applicable to other
online courses: (1) increment in the number of students; (2) dropout ratio; (3)
student recovery ratio; (4) percent of active students; (5) percent of students who
fail the course; (6) percent of students passing the exams without seeing the cor-
responding lessons; and (7) percent of students taking the course in a continuous
or sequential pattern.

5. Conclusions
The increasing use of ICT in higher education institutions (HEI) calls for digital
leadership, whereby new innovative solutions to support student learning in the
digital age are explored using advanced technologies and evaluated to support
value creation. Knowledge extracted from student–teacher interactions is then
used to analyze gaps using other technologies, such as AI and NLP, to improve
learning outcomes by adapting various pedagogical activities. Just as other
organizations have learned, digital leadership in higher educational institutions
has to develop digital services, that is, service innovations that leverage advanced
technologies, to engage students in their learning process and analyze their learn-
ing to improve student performance.
The agility with which organizations need to adapt to changing customer
expectations while at the same time maintaining stability to create and sustain
value in today’s fast changing environment creates complexity. Complex adap-
tive systems have learned to use multiple leadership processes (administrative,
enabling, and adaptive) to move between stability and instability or operate in a
state of bounded instability (Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007). While most
service provider ecosystems (i.e., business and service organizations) use external
partners and customers to learn about value in context in the customer ecosystem
to create and sustain value, the HEI have a unique opportunity. The customers
of these HEI (students) spend significant amount of time in the provider (HEI)
ecosystem, thus allowing the HEI to use multiple technology platforms (e.g.,
online discussion platforms) to engage students in creating value and learn about
value-in-context to revise the HEI processes. As discussed in the chapter, analytics
engines and AI/NLP technologies can be used to support learning by the HEIs as
they continue to adapt their pedagogical innovations to support student learning
in the digital age.
Some areas for future research include tailoring the type of analysis needed to
address the type of learning students need to engage in. The knowledge frame-
work proposed identifies four different types of learning: first- and second-order
learning and academic and experiential learning to support both reflective learn-
ing and capability for abstraction. Depending on where students are on their edu-
cational ladder – undergraduate to graduate/postgraduate, full-time or part-time
working professional – digital services designed and explored can be tailored to
address their learning needs in each of these four quadrants. Also, by learning
 Digital Leadership in Education    87

about the speed with which the VUCA environment influences the disciplines
(e.g., science and engineering fields vis-á-vis business and social sciences), the
technologies used to design digital services that engage students may vary both in
the frequency of engagement and the richness of interactions to seek knowledge.
In conclusion, HEIs have an opportunity to exhibit digital leadership to inno-
vate, explore, and evaluate new methods to engage students in their learning, not
only to teach the basic knowledge of the academic discipline but also allow them
to contextualize this knowledge as they prepare to enter the VUCA world to solve
problems and professionally grow in their chosen disciplines.

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Appendix. Two Different Models for

Mentoring and Experiential Learning.

Fig. A1.  A Conceptual Model Illustrating the Function of

the Community Academic Exchange (Tanniru et al., 2013).

Fig. A2.  Applied Technology in Business Program

(Tanniru & Agarwal, 2002).