Funding success for leadership development research project

Dr Fahri Karakas, Research Fellow at The Open University Business School, has been awarded £10,000 from the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (Small Development Project grant) for his project ‘A Distributed Leadership Approach to Supporting Internationalisation in Higher Educational Institutions: The Open University’.

The project will explore the initiation and sustainability of long-term international partnerships and how these are contingent upon effectively responding to the challenges of working and collaborating across national boundaries.

Dr Karakas notes that differences in academic cultures, languages, educational and political systems, and economic policy and infrastructures can make this particularly challenging. Learning through deep engagement in international partnerships will help university faculty and staff from all levels to navigate these differences.

“When partnership arrangements are made, international partners are mostly engaged at the level of the senior leadership team and contact continues through a small number of key individuals. However, distributed contacts and collaboration across a broader range of staff are much more difficult to nurture and to sustain; although they are necessary for international partnerships to be sustained in the long term, and vital if there is to be significant mutual learning.” Said Dr Karakas.

Adding “We believe this project will produce significant outputs and learning on building and sustaining international partnerships that can be replicated across UK HE institutions. The aim of this project is to develop the capacity for OU staff and faculty in initiating and nurturing international partnerships using digital tools and social networking.”

The project will draw on existing Open University expertise in managing international partnerships and in the use of social networking tools including include OpenLearn, academia.edu, and Cloudworks.

Project will start in March 2011 and run until the end of March 2012 and will be lead by Dr Karakas with support from Professors Mark Fenton-O’Creevy and James Fleck. Professor Sally Dibb, Carmel McMahon and Sara Pierson will provide additional project support.