Role of Academic Leadership in Building an Open-Lab Teaching and Learning Strategy

Current higher education context is very demanding and academic leadership is facing a lot of pressure coming from different stakeholders; they question the efforts on outcomes, such as: higher employability rate, lower drop-out rate, higher student satisfaction, higher number of strategic partnerships. No matter what relationships are established between higher education institutions and other stakeholders, the interconnection between all components of the institutional mission is a starting point for a change. A huge interest has been quite recently put on the higher education institutions role on societal engagement; nevertheless, the investment in new strategies for teaching and learning has revealed several good practices on open lab model. Specific literature review shows that this model can be considered as a win-win strategy model, all partners gaining successful results. This paper explains how an open-lab model functions and how academic leadership can contribute to make the teaching and learning strategy an effective one. The research methodology is based on a literature review, as well as on a brainstorming session and a questionnaire-based approach revealing the perceptions of academic leadership in moving forward to such a model. Main objectives include: to understand the open-lab teaching and learning model; to explain the open lab experience in a Civic European University; to reveal the academic leadership perceptions on developing the model; to build a possible strategy for an open-lab teaching and learning. Main findings prove that academic leadership is aware about the importance of moving towards open-lab challenges, but not effectively prepared for it.