Educational Technology Leadership for Digital Transformation in Chinese Higher Education: A Contextualized Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Digital investment does not necessarily alter how universities teach, conduct research, or organize services. Existing transformation frameworks specify areas of change, while leadership studies identify relevant attributes and practices; the relationships linking these contributions remain insufficiently specified across organizational levels. This conceptual article develops a contextualized explanation for Chinese higher education through an integrative synthesis anchored in Xiao and Wang's three transformation domains and five layers. Five interacting leadership processes are distinguished: strategic educational sensemaking; infrastructure and data orchestration; enabling professional capability and faculty agency; distributed experimentation and adaptive scaling; and responsible governance and evidence-informed evaluation. Eight propositions specify investment alignment, indirect paths through coordination and professional action, and conditions affecting participation, scaling, and persistence. The contribution lies in relating these processes to different transformation problems and specifying where their effects depend on organizational support, prior trust, and domain-specific maturity. Chinese policy priorities and institution-level variation define the context of application rather than establish national uniqueness. A literature comparison, synthesis matrix, and proposition-level research agenda distinguish inherited concepts from the relationships proposed here. The framework offers an analytical guide for institutional reflection and future research; it is neither an empirically validated causal model nor a validated diagnostic instrument.