Dr. 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.