In higher education, the ability to navigate and function well in a diverse digital ecosystem is now essential to student, academic, and professional flourishing and productivity. Universities had to respond to a pandemic that catapulted face-to-face offerings into online and hybrid environments. More recently, a preference for working from home in addition to remote work and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence is straining the capacity of educational leaders to effectively support their workforce. In this international study, we survey 533 university employees (primarily academics) and provide evidence for the effect of authentic leadership on digital productivity through digital capability and digital preparedness to work and to teach. Through structural equation modelling, we identify opportunities to prioritise effective leadership development with nested digital capability to support universities to build more resilient and productive workers to achieve better educational outcomes. Critically, recognising and developing authentic leader behaviors should be embedded into higher education policy and strategy to improve productivity, including programs to develop academic capability to use digital technologies effectively in their teaching or other academic roles.

Employability is a set of key personal attributes and transferable and discipline-specific skills considered essential for effective workplace performance; however, there are numerous perspectives about employability and how to develop it in higher education. Definitions and measurements of employability are influenced by factors such as government policy, requirements of employers, discipline norms and structural barriers. In the context of the Special Issue: 20-year JUTLP Review, this structured narrative review aimed to explore and understand employability to inform higher education learning and teaching practice. Forty-six articles published in the Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice were included, set in the context of 45 review articles on employability sourced from Scopus and ERIC databases and other selected literature. Several definitions of employability drew on existing employability frameworks and researchers’ evolving conceptions of employability within their disciplinary contexts. We propose a composite definition of employability based on the findings from this review: Employability is lifelong, evolving and complex, requiring adaptability and capabilities including knowledge, skills and attributes to obtain sustainable employment and resolve work ambiguities in challenging globalised, sociocultural and economic contexts. Higher education teaching practices, curriculum and assessment develop employability by developing discipline-specific alongside transferable knowledge, skills, attitudes, literacies, competencies, capacities and capabilities relevant to potential workplaces and aligned with employability attributes. Student-centred experiential learning models such as work-integrated learning, internships, industry experience, problem-based learning and reflection promote employability. Higher education also should promote career development competencies to enable students to showcase their skills, experiences, and attributes to employers through e-portfolios.

Contemporary society is characterized by the prevalence of wicked problems to which the efforts and actions of some entrepreneurs have negatively contributed to social problems. Corporate social responsibility emerged as an early response to multi-factor problems that are difficult to conceptualize or structure, but it has had limited success in engendering significant structural societal change. Social entrepreneurship is a contested construct that typically includes the social entrepreneur. A definition of social entrepreneurs is provided drawing on the literature. Social entrepreneurs offer leadership for social innovation outcomes as an antidote to prevailing social issues. This contributes to the literature on social entrepreneurs by examining how social entrepreneurs lead in the digital era. Importantly, this chapter considers the role that authentic leader behaviors (awareness, sincerity, balanced processing, positive moral perspectives, and informal influence) has in enabling social entrepreneurs to create and innovate.

'Fit for Purpose': a cohort-centric approach to MOOC design

Public health education is an important part of national health systems that is intended to have a positive impact on the health behaviours of citizens and prevent health problems developing that require costly interactions with the acute health care system. In this paper we report findings from a twelve month ethnographic case study that collected observation, document/artefact and semi-structured interview data related to the information activities involved in community education work, specifically the targeted delivery of breast cancer information to relevant parts of a demographically defined community. We applied Leckie et al's (1996) model of the information behavior of professionals to highlight specific characteristics of different tasks and environments involved in professional breast cancer information delivery. The two main contributions of the paper are 1. an analysis of the way information grounds are both sought and leveraged in order to distribute information in breast cancer information delivery, and 2. the importance of (and understanding of) micro-information seeking in leveraging information grounds.