What is the importance of leadership and by whom? An analysis was conducted to determine the correlation between the perception of success and the leadership provided directly by various key administrators. The results showed that support of administrators was a key factor in perceiving success, but not as key as the motivating factors illuminated in the prior section or the factors of prioritization of resources to high impact programs and allocation of funding to support the initiatives. Correlation of the perception of success to administrative support was as follows:

There was a clear indication that all key administrators were not necessarily on board with setting e-Learning as a priority. Whereas most of the presidents and provosts (not all of the institutions had a provost-titled executive) clearly set a priority for e-Learning, a few did not, and, there was not universal agreement among key administrators. Yet, as shown above, the support from key administrators had about equal correlation with success as that from presidents and provosts. This finding correlates well with the answer to which individuals had primary responsibility for success of the e-Learning initiative. The top four responses were:

But, this tells only a small part of the story on leadership. When asked to select only the three most important factors for success from a list of twenty, presidential vision/leadership comes in second only to Faculty Buy-In (see Figure 6). Another factor in the list of twenty was faculty leadership, which came in tied for thirteenth at only 5%.

However, it was noted out of the interviews that in some institutions there emerged a theme of the importance of grass-roots leadership from the faculty. This was particularly true in the community colleges where in at least a couple of cases it was clearly viewed as necessary that the primary driver comes from the faculty.

To explore the issue of top-down presidential and grass-roots faculty leadership we added a question in the final survey that forced the respondents to select only the one primary source of leadership from executive-driven, faculty-driven, or student-driven. The results show that executive leadership was the primary driver by a factor of three to one.

However, our conclusion from the combined surveys and interviews was that the best practice that resulted in the most substantial progress was the ability to provide top down leadership that facilitated the health and growth of the grass-roots sources. In other words, a combination of top-down with grass-roots appeared to be most advantageous.

Another apparent takeaway was that the source of leadership was most varied in the non-profit public research/doctoral institutions where there was not only a mix of executive and faculty, but two institutions selected student demands being the primary driver.

The surveys revealed the strength of executive support and leadership through the following dominate perceptions:

Taken in total our interpretation of the data in conjunction with the interviews leads us to the following conclusions: