Letter from the University Innovation Fellows team

We don’t need to tell you that the last year has been a challenging one for learners, teachers and the whole of higher education around the world. Faced with everything from health concerns to dwindling enrollment to the forced transition to remote learning, colleges and universities have had to pivot and adapt quickly. In our experience, we’ve found that times of great challenge can also be times of great opportunity when we have the right mindsets and tools.

Every year, we work with hundreds of students and educators to help them make a difference in higher ed. Our University Innovation Fellows program trains students to become campus leaders who create new learning opportunities for peers at their schools. Our new Faculty Innovation Fellows program (learn more on page 70) creates a community of like-minded teachers who collaborate with Fellows to design new ways of engaging their learners.

During the pandemic, we have been especially proud of these amazing bright minds in our community. Despite the challenges they faced, they continued to meet, plan, and make change happen for the benefit of others.

In this journal, we celebrate these projects and the people who are working so hard to help their schools navigate the ambiguity of these times. This, like much of what we do, is an experiment; it’s our first published collection of projects and perspectives. These pages contain detailed goals and plans related to the challenges identified by our student University Innovation Fellows and Faculty Innovation Fellows candidates. They’re grouped in broad categories for the sake of easy reading, but many projects serve several purposes.

By the time this is printed, some of these projects will have evolved, some will have been implemented, some will have been scrapped, and new projects will be in progress. All of this content represents valuable learning and growth on the part of the students and faculty.

We hope this publication also serves to highlight the state of higher education today: what students need, and what we are doing to ensure that all learners are prepared. Because, as we found out in the last year and a half, we never know what will come. We can’t let the future happen to us. We need to shape the future we want to see.

Thank you to our entire family of Fellows and Faculty Champions for making this publication possible, and for giving us the best reason to do the work that we do.

The University Innovation Fellows Team

Leticia Britos Cavagnaro Humera Fasihuddin Lupe Makasyuk Laurie Moore Ghanashyam S