Change or Be Changed—Online Education and Organizational Culture at Universities Jürgen-Matthias Seeler, Desiree Wieser, Anita Zehrer, and Karin Sixl-Daniell 1 Introduction Online education has become an increasingly important sector within universities. It can provide potential for growth of the institutions and enables learners who are otherwise not able to commit to studies in traditional university programs. Online education is more than just recording traditional classroom lectures and making them available via internet. Instead, it integrates digitization and the internet in the learning process (Volery & Lord, 2000). This paper elaborates on the various challenges within universities when adopting online education. It aims to identify areas in which universities will have to consider changes of organizational culture to meet upcoming demands resulting from the shift to online education. The report is partly based on previous research findings as well as experiences from two universities, namely Management Center Innsbruck, Austria (MCI), and IUBH International University of Applied Sciences, Germany (IUBH). It uses the results in order to discuss potential changes in the way universities operate and prompts at respective changes in organizational culture. Using secondary data from previously conducted research and experiences in university management, this report is case study oriented and shall be understood as a position paper. It indicates potential challenges which university leadership must address in order to adopt digitization trends. The call for cultural change at universities results from the understanding of organizational culture underlying this paper: Organizational culture is a set of traditional values and norms of a group, which are guiding individuals’ behavior within that group (Engelen & Tholen, 2014; J.-M. Seeler (B ) IU International University of Applied Sciences (formerly IUBH), Erfurt, Germany e-mail: juergen-matthias.seeler@iu.org D. Wieser · A. Zehrer · K. Sixl-Daniell Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Herberger and J. Dötsch (eds.), Digitalization, Digital Transformation and Sustainability in the Global Economy, Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77340-3_9 115