I don't know what academic institutions you're talking about (it means university in my book), but in non of the academic institutions I worked for did the academics have anything to do with IT decision making (except for maybe filling out a survey). Which is unfortunate because then we wouldn't have to deal with stupid IT people coming from large businesses and thinking that universities are just the same as any business. To give you examples of some of the stupidity I have seen from university IT (and yes they are almost completely recruited from other large businesses): operating system researchers not given admin rights, every semester break reimaging the lab pc and never checking that the special drivers and software for the lab equipment is installed correctly (solution: have the professors/academics check every lab PC before semester starts, great thing to check 200 PCs one week before the beginning of the lectures where you have lots of other things to do), no ability to share calendars with outside people because security (suggested workaround just sync to Google on you phone and use that, I kidd you not). Generally, only buy Microsoft (or some other huge proprietary vendor) tech which can never be adjusted to the needs of the academics actually working with it.

TLDR there is lots of things wrong with It in academia, but academics making the decisions is not one of them. Also, generally most universities I know about were reasonably well prepared for online courses and it worked largely seemlessly.

> Far too many technology decisions and implementations in post-secondaries are made by academic/bureaucrats who have no expertise or background in technology.

Many people who are very knowledgable in technology (the SV bubble is rather an exception) are very conservative in terms of it. Don't confuse good programmers with "technology hipsters".

I'm not talking about programmers at all - rather the technology strategy and policy designers and implementers that come before them.

My background includes software dev in and around online education for almost 20y in both industry and academic.

Totally outside bubbles and following groupthink :)

The conservatism from technologists that you speak of.. in part comes from the politics at post secondaries and the resistance towards adopting technology.

There's no shortage of understanding in most institutions of the problems and how to solve them, only the political will, and leadership who cares.