Are you a course coordinator or programme director? Strengthen your role with CED

This autumn, you have the opportunity to explore and further develop your role in educational development through CED’s course ‘Educational leadership – for academic staff with responsibility for coordinating and developing education and teaching’. The course is aimed at course coordinators, programme directors, and other academic staff who, in addition to their own teaching and research, hold a particular organisational responsibility for coordinating and developing education and teaching.

“The course gives participants the opportunity to gain a new, external perspective on their role and to work with key themes such as course evaluation, meeting facilitation, expectation alignment, and collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders,” says course leader and Assistant Professor at CED, Sanna Lassen.

For more than two decades, Sanna Lassen has worked with leadership in a variety of contexts, including leadership development in the municipal sector and as a sparring partner for leadership teams. She has taught on VIA University College’s Diploma Programme in Leadership and now leads the research project EDULEAD, which explores educational leadership in universities.

During the course, Sanna Lassen and other CED teachers will provide participants with feedback and guidance on their own experiences, ideas, and challenges, and participants can work on how to create direction, collaboration, and momentum within their own local contexts.

A role without formal managerial responsibility

Many of the people Sanna Lassen encounters in her research are responsible for developing teaching and educational programmes, yet they do not see themselves as leaders.

“They are appointed to take responsibility for teaching and education on behalf of the wider community and in collaboration with colleagues. But they do not have personnel management responsibilities, and therefore many of them say: ‘I’m not a leader,’” explains Sanna Lassen.

According to Sanna Lassen, this is precisely one of the reasons why the concept of educational leadership can create confusion. One of the central aims of the course is therefore to explore what educational leadership entails for this particular group of staff, who are formally appointed but do not hold formal managerial authority.

The organisational space in-between

Through interviews with both educational leaders and their line managers, Sanna Lassen has identified a clear need for peer support and professional development opportunities for educational leaders in the university sector.

Her research suggests that this type of role is not unique to universities, although it is particularly visible within the university sector. At the same time, the role has become increasingly complex, as educational programmes must respond to a growing number of internal and external demands, increasing the need for coordination.

“What these roles have in common is that they exist in an organisational space in-between. As a result, success depends to a large extent on the ability to facilitate collaboration, create direction, and achieve results through and together with others. There are more and more issues to manage, and more stakeholders that need to be connected,” explains Sanna Lassen.

For example, a course coordinator may be responsible for supporting the coordination and development of educational programmes through collaboration with a diverse group of stakeholders. These may include students, fellow teachers who are also colleagues, formal managers, administrative staff, and external partners and employers associated with the programme. In this context, aligning expectations is a crucial prerequisite for carrying out the coordinator role effectively.

A key finding from Sanna Lassen’s research is that the role of educational leader involves a shift in how results are achieved. Whereas teachers are traditionally responsible for their own teaching, people in these roles must succeed through others.

“This type of role is formally appointed to take responsibility for teaching and educational tasks that need to succeed. Not only in their own teaching, but in collaboration with colleagues. And that can be at every level. To create learning for students, you actually need to facilitate change among colleagues,” says Sanna Lassen.

A shared language and a clear mandate

The educational leadership role is also characterised by the fact that there is often no shared language for describing what it entails. In her research, Sanna Lassen asked participants what responsibilities staff with these roles have, how the role is discussed and understood, and what tasks it involves. She explains:

“These staff members carry out what is known as ‘silent synchronising’ – making things fit together. They are given the role without necessarily being given a clear definition of the task or the competencies associated with it. Challenges include the lack of a shared language for the role, unclear expectations and frameworks, increased responsibility and relatively low status compared with research.”

The issue is not necessarily about turning the role into a traditional management position, but rather about creating clarity regarding mandate, expectations and areas of collaboration. Sanna Lassen’s research therefore aims both to generate knowledge and to translate that knowledge into practice for this group of staff:

“How can we support them? What competencies are required for their role? And how do we recruit and retain them? It is about making research useful for practice so that these staff members do not find themselves having to define their own tasks and ways of handling them in isolation,” she says.

According to Sanna Lassen, the ambition of the educational leadership course is not to introduce a new leadership identity, but to strengthen what participants are already doing:

“They do not necessarily need to move into formal leadership positions, but there is a need to articulate and define the mandate they have. The aim is to explore their practice and strengthen what they already do. If their mandate is not clear, they end up having to reinvent things constantly, and that can be exhausting,” explains Sanna Lassen.

How to join

Do you have responsibility for coordinating and developing education and teaching, and would you like to strengthen your practice?

The course ‘Educational leadership – for academic staff with responsibility for coordinating and developing education and teaching’ begins on 16 September 2026. Registration is open until 19 August.

Read more about the course and register here.

You are also welcome to contact Sanna Lassen to learn more about the possibility of individual, tailored guidance and support.

Do you need further consultancy and guidance on teaching and education?

CED also offers consultancy, peer mentoring, and guidance on education and teaching. Here, you can, among other things, book a consultant or read our guide to subject coordinators’ collaboration with and management of student instructors.

You can also find additional webinars, workshops, and courses for senior academic staff here.

This English text was machine-translated using ChatGPT. The author subsequently reviewed and edited the translation manually to ensure that the meaning, tone, and subject-specific terminology are rendered accurately and naturally in the target language.