Six Leaders Named to Innovation Fellows to Drive Evolution of Higher Education

Instructional design firm iDesign launches new fellows initiative recognizing pioneering set of institutions working to support quality through curriculum mapping, outcomes alignment, and career relevance

DALLAS, Sept. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- iDesign, a leader in instructional design and online learning, today announced the launch of the Innovation Fellows Program, aimed at empowering senior leaders in higher education to tackle complex challenges related to curriculum alignment, learning frameworks, quality benchmarks, accreditation standards, skills mapping, industry competencies, and workforce alignment. This initiative will leverage iDesign's cutting-edge AI-assisted curriculum mapping tool, Align.

"In today's rapidly evolving educational landscape, it is imperative that we equip learners with the tools and knowledge they need to succeed in their careers," said Dr. Whitney Kilgore, Chief Academic Officer and Co-founder of iDesign. "We're thrilled to recognize this pioneering group of leaders who are working to better understand how courses translate into skills and competencies that matter to employers—enhancing outcomes, improving transparency, and creating a higher quality experience for learners."

The inaugural class of Innovation Fellows includes:

• Erin Crisp, Executive Director, Tennessee Grow Your Own Center, University of Tennessee System
• Terry Di Paolo, Chief of Academic Initiatives, Dallas College
• Laura Erskine, MHA Program Director, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• David Herring, Learning Curriculum Designer, University of Arizona
• Lisa McIntyre-Hyte, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Competency-Based Education Network
• Corey Vigdor, AVP of Online Education, Augusta University

Innovation Fellows will collaborate directly with other leaders focused on scaling quality digital instruction at their institutions and across higher education. They will have the opportunity to participate in continuous improvement workshops, case studies, and collaborative research projects, proactively documenting and highlighting the value propositions their programs offer to students and employers while helping other institutions follow suit.

Each of the Fellows will leverage Align, a tool designed and built by iDesign that provides administrators and program leaders with powerful capabilities to effectively align and map programs and curriculum to a range of accreditation standards and workforce competencies.

By leveraging Align's sophisticated visualizations and reporting capabilities, faculty and administrators can ensure the course design process aligns with critical quality assurance benchmarks.  Additionally, the Innovation Fellows will be able to drive actionable insights into curriculum data, making the course design process more efficient and effective.

About Align: Align captures detailed curriculum data at the granular level, mapping it to skills, competencies, outcomes, and standards, while also tracking time-on-task and other learner experience dimensions. It transforms traditional, cumbersome curriculum documentation into actionable insights with visualizations that highlight gaps, overlaps, and support complex stakeholder communication. Align fosters continuous improvement by ensuring curriculum data evolves alongside live course offerings, enabling seamless updates and precise identification of areas for enhancement. It simplifies reporting and accreditation by providing up-to-date, comprehensive curriculum maps and generating necessary documentation effortlessly.  https://studio.idesignedu.org/ 

About iDesign: iDesign partners with colleges and universities to build, grow, and support online and blended programs. We are passionate about helping faculty harness the potential of emerging technologies to design courses and degrees that make an impact, whether they are fully online, flipped, blended, adaptive, or competency-based. Our unbundled, fee-for-service model is rooted in a commitment to flexibility and institutional autonomy, while our analytics platform supports continuous improvement through rigorous measurement of student engagement and course quality. From statewide university systems to private colleges, our custom solutions pair instructional design with technologies to enable great teaching. To learn more, please visit www.idesignedu.org.

SOURCE idesignedu.org