Academic Innovation -- be the change!

As we cull through the lessons learned from the pandemic of 2020 and continue to weather continued disruptions to our sector, it becomes increasingly important for institutions to create innovative and sustainable instructional delivery models that can be pivoted with ease and also meet the learning needs of students.  As campuses around the globe continue to address the changing nature of COVID-19, many higher education leaders have started to recognize that sustainability and flexibility should be a key part of academic planning.  This session will take participants through exercises meant to free up their thinking from traditional academic delivery models into a space of creativity and open possibilities for organizational structures and development, as well as projects and programs that support online learning and delivery.  Leveraging design thinking, Blue Ocean Strategy, and drawing on fundamental concepts from entrepreneurship, participants will work on developing a rubric for academic innovation at their institutions, and think through a menu of new models that they can take back to their institutions to garner other stakeholder input into for possible implementation.  Participants will be challenged by the session facilitators, and peers -- both in small groups and as a larger group -- to think more boldly and broadly about models of academic delivery that meet the needs of the institution and its faculty, staff, and students and ones that are flexible and sustainable as well.  Participants will leave the session able to:

1. Discuss innovation within the context of academic delivery models, 

2. Identify core attributes of a future academic delivery models at their institutions, and

3. Develop a set of possible innovations that can be implemented at their institutions.