Marti Cleveland-Innes
Higher Education Transformation and Lifelong Learning
Current higher education practices may support or diminish lifelong learning, as a topic and an outcome. This issue was explored via an expanded Delphi method that gathered data from prominent scholars and practitioners around the world. This data driven exercise was guided by the question: What are the critical aspects of higher education transformation needed for lifelong learning in a digital era? When situated alongside recent research on lifelong learning, networked learning ecosystems, and AI‑supported professional development, this integrated perspective suggests that transformation is not merely technological but deeply relational, ethical, and developmental. The seven themes identified via research are: accessibility, digital literacy, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), leadership, multimodal delivery, pedagogical change, and quality and organizational states. These aspects function as structural dimensions through which this transformation becomes visible and actionable. As a potential perceptual lens. convergence of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework with Kemmis’s dialectical relationism and Bandura’s reciprocal determinism provides a robust theoretical foundation for understanding higher education transformation activities in the digital era.
Biography
Dr. Martha Cleveland-Innes is Professor of Education Innovation at Athabasca University and is Editor-in-Chief of the bilingual Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. She is the co-author of several open-source publications, including The Guide to Blended Learning (2018), Participant Experience in an Inquiry-Based Massive Open Online Course (2022), and Principles of Blended Learning (2024). She also co-edited The Design of Digital Learning Environments: Online and Blended Applications of the Community of Inquiry (Taylor& Francis, 2024).
As a principal investigator, Dr. Cleveland-Innes received funding from the One Child, Every Child initiative, supported by SSHRC’s Canada First Research Excellence Fund, to examine Wellness Outcomes and Educational Participation Among Sick Children from Marginalized Populations (2024–2027). She has held other major research grants focused on the technology‑enabled student experience.
Her contributions to the field cross many venues. In 2019, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Mid‑Sweden University and received the Leadership Award from the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education. She later served on the Advisory Group for Digital Literacy with the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education (2021–2022). Dr. Cleveland-Innes was the Virtual Educator in Residence at the National University of Singapore (Fall 2022), served as Visiting Professor of Pedagogy at Mid‑Sweden University (2018–2025), and is currently Vice-President of the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education.