Responding to Challenges through Innovation
Challenges confront higher education in virtually every part of the enterprise: funding, governance, teaching, technology, equity, outcomes, and purpose. It’s obvious that many of these challenges will not go away any time soon; indeed, if anything, the number of challenges seems to be increasing. In the academic part of the system, critical challenges include helping under-prepared students, designing intrusive and effective advising, creating pathways that students understand, tracking and responding to student progress, creating engaging learning environments, assessing and increasing learning outcomes, designing a coherent general education curriculum, developing more contemporary majors, designing effective, early career planning, and a host of other issues.
The campuses that survive and thrive will be those that innovate. In our Academic Affairs Summer Meeting, we will continue the focus of the recent winter meeting on innovation in higher education. We’re interested in what innovations are currently being tried on different campuses. Who is leading innovation and why are they doing it? What are the innovations being attempted? What innovations are successful? What are the obstacles to innovation? How do we build a culture of innovation?
We’ll also have the broad array of other issues that we typically present in our academic affairs conferences, addressing prominent academic issues in the academy: faculty issues (hiring, professional development, academic freedom, contingent faculty), academic policies and practices (free speech, tenure, etc.), instructional innovation, and a variety of other academic issues. A core strand running through this conference will be a focus on student success, engaging participants in the recent work AASCU has undertaken thru Re-Imaging the First Year and the Frontier Set. Our conferences are deliberately eclectic, with a wide range of topics that appeal to the broad range of experiences and interests of our diverse set of participants.
We also use a variety of formats: presentations, poster sessions, small group discussions and other ways to engage participants in engaged, interactive activities. Our conferences are first and foremost learning events, where participants can gather ideas and interact with colleagues in a relaxed, comfortable atmosphere.
We hope you will join us.
