The Innovation Imperative: Empowering, Celebrating, and Rewarding Campus Change Agents

Institutions don’t innovate; individuals working with and for them do. Cutting-edge curricular models emerge when creative educators collaborate to change existing practices and structures. Active and engaging pedagogies are implemented when faculty take risks, one course at a time. Assessment leads to actual change when empowered professionals use their critical thinking skills and methodological chops to identify and act on evidence from the overwhelming amount of datapoints generated on any given campus. Yet, in the era of “Quiet Quitting” and the “Great Resignation,” colleges and universities risk losing the very individuals on whom future institutional success, if not outright survival, depends.

The 2023 Conference on General Education, Pedagogy, and Assessment provides an opportunity to empower and celebrate the work of the myriad change agents who work every day to ensure the continued vitality of the undergraduate educational experience. The conference will highlight innovations from a range of institutions and educational providers designed to meet the needs of students in 2023 and beyond. Whether upending the traditional sixteen-week semester calendar, mixing in hybrid or hyflex teaching, leveraging competency-based approaches and micro-credentialing, or reimagining learning within more traditional contexts, educators from across the global higher education landscape are encouraged not only to showcase their work, but also to share their theories of change and lessons learned.

Throughout the program, there will be opportunities to identify barriers to innovation and to develop concrete strategies for dismantling them—including multiple opportunities to engage with faculty and “alumnae” from the AAC&U Institute on General Education and Assessment. This hybrid event will take place throughout the month of February, kickstarting with the in-person event in New Orleans, followed by virtual events on three successive Wednesdays, each focused on one of the conference’s three content pillars:

• February 9–11, 2023: In-Person in New Orleans
• February 15, 2023: Virtual GENERAL EDUCATION, Pedagogy, and Assessment Session
• February 22, 2023: Virtual General Education, PEDAGOGY, and Assessment Session
• March 1, 2023: Virtual General Education, Pedagogy, and ASSESSMENT Session

All session presenters are responsible for paying the conference registration fees. Presenters should plan to be available at the time their session is scheduled.