Amid mounting institutional pressures and a rapidly changing higher education landscape, leadership churn at colleges and universities represents a major roadblock to institutional success. In "Leading across the Arc of Time," college president Mark L. Putnam presents a vital road map for navigating the complex dynamics of managing…

To help higher education instructors, academic support personnel, and institutional leadership better identify, encourage, incentivize, fund, support and assess pedagogical innovation, we describe herein a valid taxonomy capable of precisely characterizing the range of pedagogical innovations in higher education. The Taxonomy of Pedagogical…

Many universities began prioritizing efficiency over efficacy in the 1990s, contributing to educator and student exhaustion. Meanwhile, vocational awe paradigms have led faculty to sacrifice personal time and health to satisfy students. The Slow Academia movement offers a different approach. Bypassing quantifiable outcomes and metrics, it…

The Grand Challenges for Assessment in Higher Education project is a collaborative effort of 10 endorsing organizations and over 400 volunteers to increase the extent to which assessment (1) supports equity; (2) is visible, actionable, and drives innovation; and (3) guides rapid improvements in pedagogy (Singer-Freeman and Robinson 2020). Several…

Members of the Higher Education (HE) community have embodied the spirit of designers by identifying needs and creatively responding with speed, agility and ingenuity as a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While these rapid changes were required at the time of the pandemic, the lack of an innovation structure in HEIs (Higher Education…

Higher education is in a moment of systemic crisis; the next 20 years will bring significant change, but the nature of that change is still up for grabs. Higher education also contains wellsprings of creativity and innovation in support of engaged, equitable, holistic learning, but these are siloed and piecemeal. Positive, systemic change is…

It's time to design the next iteration of higher education. There is no question that higher education faces significant challenges. Most of today's universities aren't prepared to tackle issues like demographic change, the continued defunding of public education, cost pressures, and the opportunities and challenges of educational technologies.…

Dual enrollment has proved to be a powerful strategy for expanding college opportunity for all students, especially those who facing barriers that limit their access to postsecondary education. Extensive evidence shows that dual enrollment has wide-ranging benefits for students, high schools, colleges, and states. The model helps save time and…

The adoption of digital technologies in higher education offers new opportunities for student learning but also adds complexity to course design and development processes. Although practice varies across institutions and nations, a common response is that teams of people are now involved in the development and creation of blended and online…

Accreditation is a major barrier to higher education reform. Constitutional or not, accreditors are an administrative anomaly: private nonprofit agencies that nonetheless possess life-and-death power over higher education. To maintain federal funding, universities must satisfy the administrative requirements and whims of these unelected entities.…

Alongside primary and secondary education, tertiary education is a critical component of the education ecosystem. Universities' role in strengthening and informing education policy and practice at every level -- training teachers, creating pedagogical content, and leading educational research -- is central to reimagining education to address the…

Dr. Ada Long (1945-2024) advocated for equal access to quality education. Authors suggest that her reflections on neighborhoods, community, and intentional inclusion were not one-off musings but rather indicative of how she saw her responsibility as an educator. Drawing on Long's establishment of a lecture series that brought faculty into a local…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for change and innovation in higher education, building on prior calls to rethink college and university commitment and operation. The pandemic has also been a catalyst for change in the current practice of quality assurance through accreditation. All major activities associated with review of institutions…

Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have spurred a new sense of urgency around the transformative potential of AI in the workforce, education, and economy. Many forms of AI have long been in use in the education industry, but with the introduction of new generative AI technology (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and Bing),…

To produce actionable and accessible assessment findings that drive innovation and improvement, strategies should be implemented at the national and local level throughout each stage of the assessment process. Fostering these findings is the need to authentically engage stakeholders throughout the assessment process. Done well, the engagement of…