Essential Institutional Capacities to Lead Innovation

WCET’s 6th Leadership Summit engaged institutional leaders in a strategic discussion of how to best align and support an institution’s human capital, technology investments, and content strategy to sustain innovation in teaching and learning. Consider these job titles – chief learning officer, design engineer, data scientist, content strategist, user experience analyst, assessment director, and student data privacy director. These professional roles that support technology-enhanced teaching and learning were relatively uncommon just three years ago. Today, however, these positions are vital in the delivery of CBE, personalized learning, virtual reality, and other approaches to improve student learning outcomes.

WCET’s highly rated Leadership Summits provide a balance of expert presentations coupled with facilitated conversations among a broadly representative audience of higher education practitioners and senior-level administrators. There is no one path to building and sustaining institutional capacities for innovation.

The Summit program addressed these questions and more:

• Many tools today have learning analytics functionality. How are academic departments, faculty, advisors, and curriculum designers leveraging analytics and learning outcomes data? What are some effective models?
• How can institutional leaders better align core support functions and investments that will enable faculty, student services, and advising personnel to make a difference with student retention and completion?
• How can an institutional content strategy impact affordability, learning outcomes, student satisfaction, time to completion, and student retention within existing resource constraints?

Related Resources:

• Final Summit Agenda.
• A Checklist for Student Services.
• Aligning Investments to Support Core Functions.
• Aligning Investments – Handout.
• Education Content Strategy.
• Fail at Scale or Pilot to Tell, by Luke Dowden.
• General Session Recordings.
• Innovation Survey Results.
• Leadership Vision Sustainability.
• Leading Academic Change: An Early Market Scan of Leading-edge Postsecondary Academic Innovation Centers.
• Learning Design Infrastructure.
• Lessons for Institutions on Supporting Innovation.
• Making Your Data Analytics Actionable.
• Motivation and Enthusiasm: Work with Their Strengths – Strengths Finder and Other Assessments.
• Systems Thinking for Innovation.
• Talent Development.
• Ted Talk, How to Manage for Collective Creativity.
• Unstuck.
• Why You Probably Don’t Want Innovation, Tom Goodwin.
• World Economic Forum: 21st Century Skills and Competencies.