Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Curtis L. Odom, Ed.D., Program Leader and Executive Coach, MOR Associates. Curtis may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
As we approach 2026, academic technology leaders stand at a pivotal inflection point. The conversations happening at colleges and universities reveal not just incremental changes in educational delivery, but a fundamental reimagining of higher education’s purpose and infrastructure. For IT professionals supporting these institutions, this transformation represents both your greatest leadership opportunity and your most pressing strategic challenge. Recent research confirms the urgency, with 57% of education leaders citing technological change as their top challenge in 2025, yet only 40% express confidence in their ability to navigate it.
The Demise of the Traditional Model: Embracing Lifelong Learning
The traditional four-year degree model is dying, replaced by something far more complex and demanding: the university as a lifelong learning engine. This isn’t hyperbole. Consider that today’s graduates will need university support not for four years, but potentially for sixty years as they navigate career pivots, skill obsolescence, and technological disruption. The implications for your technology architecture, security models, data systems, and user experience design are staggering.
Here’s what keeps me up at night as an executive coach working with higher education leaders: most universities are trying to bolt lifelong learning onto infrastructure designed for a fundamentally different model. You cannot serve 140,000 continuing learners with the same systems, mindset, and organizational structure that served 50,000 traditional undergraduates. The technology debt isn’t just technical‚ it’s strategic.
The Challenge of Legacy Systems: Strategic Technology Debt
The challenge for you as an IT leader isn’t just enabling this transformation‚ it’s architecting systems flexible enough to adapt faster than curriculum committees can meet. Students entering programs in 2026 won’t graduate until 2030 to 2032. The skills landscape will shift dramatically in that window. Your learning management systems, credentialing platforms, and assessment tools need to accommodate changes you cannot yet anticipate.
This is where your leadership becomes critical. The shift to competency-based education and micro-credentials isn’t an academic fad. It’s a fundamental restructuring of how learning is packaged, delivered, verified, and stacked toward advanced qualifications. Your institution needs technology infrastructure that can issue, track, and validate credentials at granular levels while maintaining security and employer confidence.
The Micro-Credentials Revolution: Technology for New Credentials
The marketplace must recognize these micro-credentials as legitimate, which means your systems must support transparent, verifiable, and portable learning records that students control throughout their lifespans. This means your IT infrastructure must support secure collaboration across organizational boundaries, protect intellectual property while enabling open innovation, and scale to accommodate fluctuating external partnerships. Traditional campus network thinking won’t suffice. You’re architecting digital ecosystems, not closed systems.
The AI transformation adds another layer of complexity that demands your strategic attention. It’s not enough to provide AI tools to faculty and students. The entire pedagogical approach is changing. Challenge-based learning requires different digital environments than lecture-based delivery. Faculty need AI-augmented tools to personalize learning at scale.
Rapid Adaptation: Building Agile Systems
Here’s the leadership opportunity many IT professionals miss: you’re not just supporting educational delivery. You’re enabling the strategic pivot from transaction to transformation. When universities elevate continuing education from a peripheral revenue function to a mission-critical activity, your role shifts from service provider to strategic architect. The quality metrics alone tell this story‚ institutions are now tracking retention rates, organizational productivity improvements, and sustainability practice adoption for their continuing education programs. Your data systems must capture, analyze, and report on impact metrics that go far beyond enrollment numbers and course completions.
Human-Centered Strategy: Managing Resources and Opportunity
The human-centered leadership challenge here is profound. Your teams are already stretched supporting traditional operations. Now you’re being asked to architect and implement parallel systems at scale, often with limited additional resources. The anxiety is real and legitimate. And so is the opportunity to fundamentally reshape your institution’s relevance and impact. Let me offer a coaching framework to meet this moment.
IT leaders must see themselves as enablers of institutional transformation, not just system operators. By supporting continuing education as a core mission, they provide data and systems capable of capturing metrics far beyond enrollment and course completion rates. Supporting both traditional and emergent models, often with constrained resources, creates real anxiety and also immense opportunity. IT’s leadership will reshape the digital transformation of higher education, institutional relevance, and impact for decades.
- Architect for Adaptability: Ditch rigid five-year plans. Build modular systems, invest in interoperability, and avoid monolithic platforms that hinder flexibility.
- Lead Strategically: Don’t wait for academic leadership to set technology direction. Proactively shape discussions about possibilities and needs.
- Bridge to the Labor Market: Develop systems that connect university offerings with labor market data and employer feedback for dynamic program alignment.
- Focus on the Learner Experience: Design digital touch points that welcome alumni-turned-learners back seamlessly, with integrated, long-term learner management.
Seizing the Moment: Your Call to Strategic Action
The digital transformation of higher education is already underway. The question isn’t whether your university will need to become a lifelong learning engine; it’s whether you’ll architect the digital infrastructure that makes it possible or scramble to retrofit systems that were never designed for this purpose. Your leadership in this moment will determine not only your career trajectory but also your institution’s relevance in an AI-enabled future.
This is your call to strategic action. The universities that thrive will be those whose IT leaders stepped into this transformation as architects and enablers, not just as implementers of faculty requests. The time for that leadership is now.
Do you think technology challenge is your institution’s top challenge? Do you feel confident in your institution’s ability to navigate the digital transformation of higher education?
- Yes, I think it is the top challenge and I feel confident in our ability to navigate it.
- Yes, I think it is the top challenge and I don’t feel confident in our ability to navigate it.
- No, I don’t think it is the top challenge and I feel confident in our ability to navigate it.
- No, I don’t think it is the top challenge and I don’t feel confident in our ability to navigate it.
Last week, we asked which practice you want to be more intentional in:
- 28% said communicating openly, even when it’s hard
- 23% said leading with clarity of purpose
- 19% said checking your motives
- 17% said pairing accountability with care
- 12% said modeling the balance
The majority of our responses last week can be summed up in two words: communicating why. This includes both defining the purpose behind your actions AND sharing that purpose with others. This provides needed clarity and understanding. Even if people may not agree, they respect the transparency.