Chief Academic Officers Innovation Community

Empowering Chief Academic Officers to lead Innovation

The Chief Academic Officer is uniquely positioned to offer leadership and innovation. However, most chief academic officers are not formally prepared to launch innovations nor do they have a peer group to explore ideas. The continuing challenges of the pandemic, changing demographics, and decreasing enrollments have only exacerbated the need for Chief Academic Officers to drive innovation.

Chief academic officers need and deserve more peer-support, tools, networking, and professional development to help them rise to this task and to fulfill their potential for leadership. This community is an opportunity to transform how your institution responds to challenges and create better opportunities for your academic leadership teams to drive needed innovation.

Who Should Participate

Chief Academic Officers who are leading organizational change
Experienced or new Chief Academic Officers who want to focus on thier professional development
Chief Academic Officers who would like to use improvement science in driving innovation and change at their institution.

How You’ll Benefit

Meeting regularly with a cohort of your peers through a virtual year-long engagement
Improving your understanding of theories and practices of higher education innovation and change—and resistance to this
Developing a plan for significant innovation and implementation
Learning from the field-tested and refined content from two previous cohorts.
Gaining a better understanding of what you encounter as you pursue educational innovation.

Join Us for an Information Meeting

May 14 at 3 pm ET

Short-term investment towards lasting professional growth

Receive guidance, peer collaboration, and access to resources all designed to address the changing needs of institutional leadership.

Key Features

Virtual year-long engagement

The Community is designed to with both a virtual and in-person components to help create a community of peers to support each other through this work.

2 opportunities for in-person meetings

Meet your cohort in the Asheville, NC area spending two days focusing on your personal and professional development. One in the Fall of 2024 and one in Spring 2025.

An interactive community committed to personal and professional development

Learn from facilitators, peers, and past participants as you build your network and deepen your understanding of improvement science and change leadership.

Design an innovation for your institution

Structured opportunities for participants to turn theory into practice by refining their meaning of innovation and developing ideas for their own institution.

Projects worked on by past participants

Created a program to make “grassroots” innovation from faculty and staff part of a sustainable model of ongoing improvement.
Designed a plan for more equitable grading practices across the institution.
Designed a program that engages faculty, staff, and students in aligning the Liberal Arts and career readiness.
Built greater institutional capacity for innovation.
Developed useful key performance indicators to measure and drive progress through innovation
Lead change based on their philosophy of education.
Collaborated across institutions and built new transfer pathways for students in the region.
Redesigned systems to better support on-time graduation for new majority learners.
Designed a plan to increase international student enrollment and support.

Fees:

$9,250 (excludes costs for travel and lodging for in-person meetings).

Fees for The Chief Academic Officers Innovation Community may be paid over two fiscal years.

The Gardner Institute offers a discount to CAOs from under-resourced and under-represented institutions. To see if your institution qualifies, please email info@gardnerisntitute.com.

Email Info@gardnerinstitute.org for more information.

Application will be open soon

Data

Chief Academic Officers

Students impacted

$ 0

made by participants in retention revenue for every $1 used to work with us

Stories

"As a new provost, in a new institution and a new city, I was concerned about spending even the modest amount of time needed to participate in the CAO innovation group. A year later, every minute was worth the investment. The change management tools we learned and practiced were effective on my home campus, and produced positive results for this fall. The time spent in our monthly meetings developed me as a new provost and always left me with encouragement. Time at the Gardner institute was a welcome respite as their hospitality surrounded great programming and delightful company. Listening to and talking with the other CAOs was invaluable."

Robin Rylaarsdam

Provost and Executive Vice President, Bethel University

“The Curricular Analytics Community tools helped us to look deeply into the various systems that affect our students, to identify causes of delays and unintended obstacles, and to consider why systems were designed in certain ways. More than that, these tools led us from those analyses to action plans that we can implement immediately.”