Leadership Foundations in Global Online Education
Introduction and Context
Higher education has evolved over the past one thousand years and more depending upon the source you consult. However, the origins of advanced teaching and learning go back eons to the days of Socrates and before. Yet, higher education is infamous for the slow rate of change over those many, long years. We are now in a transformation from the mostly campus-based teaching and learning of the 19th and 20th century to the increasingly online distributed learning of the 1990’s until today. The advent of the World Wide Web with the release by the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois of the first Web browser, Mosaic, in 1993 (Wikipedia, 2026 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic) opened the technological pathway of the internet to enhance the correspondence courses of prior decades. Many universities began reaching out online to enroll learners in degree and certificate programs. The worldwide Covid pandemic prompted many other higher education institutions to move online. Since that time, online learning enrollments have continued to rise. Now more than half of the post-secondary students are taking at least some online classes. (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2026 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=80)
The evolution to global education online is rooted in the technologies that enable, for the first time in the history of humans, to effectively and efficiently provide interactive communication, collaboration and engagement of peoples worldwide across languages, cultures and geography. Collectively these technologies and their impact on societies are termed the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, https://www.britannica.com/event/The-Fourth-Industrial-Revolution-2119734).