| | NOVEMBER 20248IN MY OPINION Technology continues to open new doors for educators, making available a vast array of tools to share information, build realistic and interactive assignments, and expand the availability of instruction to all students. These changes have provided opportunities for educators to be more flexible, adaptable, and innovative in reaching a broader audience, including those parts of the audience who have come to expect interactive and readily available instruction that meets their lifestyles. Unfortunately, technological innovation has also accelerated the rate of change, a challenge to educators who are often overwhelmed, underfunded, and/or underprepared for change. Therefore, educational leaders must step up to this challenge by building and promoting a culture of inquiry, ensuring safety for experimentation, and rewarding innovation among the faculty and staff to help them adapt to the changes and remain relevant to the evolving needs of society.There are a number of factors to consider in this process. First, as educational leaders, we need to ensure faculty know that innovation has become an expectation both in curricular and extracurricular efforts. Our role as educational leaders is to build this expectation into the culture by recognizing and rewarding those faculty and staff who try new and innovative solutions to best meet students where they are and help them attain the knowledge and skills we, as educators, expect them to achieve. This also calls for a supportive and safe environment for those faculty and staff who are unsure of their role in this new world. Part of innovation (and learning!) is failure, and we need to create an environment where we model our learning to our students.A second part of the work is the promotion of information literacy both to faculty and to students. With rapid technological changes, most recently the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI), our society - our students, faculty and staff - face a barrage of information and misinformation daily that is daunting. Information literacy, to me, is more EDUCATION IS AT A CROSSROADS: BUILDING A CULTURE OF INNOVATIONBy Fred Hills, Faculty Lecturer, McLennan Community CollegeFred Hills
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