Announcing the UIA National Summit on Student Success Innovation!

One of the cornerstones of the UIA has always been about building a broader movement. Everything we do is for the benefit of the entire higher education sector. Our innovations, our scaling, and our diffusion are designed to supercharge student success and inspire campuses everywhere to work together and move faster. In that spirit, I’m thrilled to announce that we’re gearing up for one of our biggest diffusion events yet: the second UIA National Summit on Student Success Innovation. 

You may have attended our first national summit in 2018. At the very least, you’ve probably heard about it and the enthusiasm it created (the highlight reel is fire).

The main reason that event was such a success was that it was built on five years of intentional experiments to fundamentally redesign how we bring people together in an effort to accelerate diffusion of innovation.  After ten years of building experiences that help campuses take action, we've figured out how to create the most exciting, engaging, and inspiring events in higher education.

The difference with UIA convenings is our firm commitment to user-centered design. We feature energizing ways to keep people engaged and design around the listener rather than the speaker. Our first summit introduced higher ed to Whova, 7-minute edtalks, flipped panels, on-site process mapping & design thinking workshops, team time, and high-energy, dynamic stages designed to inspire people to share their best ideas in the most engaging way. We encourage attendees to come as a team because we learned that if you bring the right team together at an event and give them the best content and time to apply the ideas they discover, they’re more likely to leave the event and take action. (We were also fortunate to have the support of the ECMC Foundation providing small grants to support new networks that naturally formed and emerged at the summit.)

Now, with ten years under our belt, our second national summit will be even better than the first and perfectly timed to give you the inspiration, community, and purpose you need to keep moving forward with the resilient focus we will need in the year ahead. Save the date for October 23-25 in Tempe, Arizona. (These are not annual events, so you're going to want to grab your spot when registration opens.)

As our team puts together this world-class experience to advance student success innovation, I want to cast a wide net for support to make this experience a reality for any person in higher ed.  We don't create convenings to generate revenue; rather, we are laser-focused on building an experience that will accelerate the diffusion of student success innovation and lead to more collaboration across the sector. We are particularly interested in raising funds that will support new innovation clusters and networks that emerge from the summit and scholarship support to enable attendance and travel, especially for roles and institutions that rarely have the capacity for professional development. 

We have spent a decade creating the things we wish had existed when we launched the UIA, and this event is the experience that would have accelerated the UIA’s formation, emergence, and success. It is our love letter to a sector that has supported our goals, riffed on our ideas, and said “yes and” to our methods – as well as to the countless generous organizations, institutions, and leaders who have patiently taught, coached, and inspired us over the years.