This document discusses the importance of strategic planning and management in educational institutions. It explains that goals must be clearly defined before strategies are developed to achieve them, and that strategic management involves identifying goals and designing and implementing strategies. It also notes that a strategic plan provides a roadmap for pursuing goals and delivering value, and that strategists must determine how specific goals, like expanding the student base, will be achieved through lowering fees, acquisitions, expanding programs, or other means. The course will cover defining terms, identifying goals, formulating strategies, and implementing plans.

1. In this course, you will learn that you must first clearly define your goals before you
develop strategies in order to achieve them. You will also learn that strategy in
educational management is similar to strategy in business, sports, war, or politics; the
parallels are so close that early business strategists studied military strategies in depth.
The science of strategy development has developed beyond this by now, but the parallels
still exist.
Strategic management involves two processes: first, the process of identifying specific
goals for an educational institution and designing strategies to achieve those goals, and
second, the process of implementing those strategies. The strategic plan addresses the
what and why of activities, but implementation addresses the who, where, when, and
how.
A strategic plan provides a business with the roadmap it needs to pursue a specific
strategic direction and set of performance goals, deliver customer value, and be
successful. It is easy to say that your goal is to expand your student base by 50% in three
years, but how do you go about achieving that goal? Are you going to lower student fee,
acquire a competitor, move into other faculties, or something else? Assuming you are
going to lower fee, how are you going to do so and keep revenues up? These are the sorts
of questions that strategists must answer.

2. This course begins with an introduction to the field and the definition of some important
terms and concepts. You will then move on to identifying goals and formulating
strategies before addressing implementation topics.