The Hope and Hype of the Academic Innovation Center

The College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University had a problem. Although its programs fared well on conventional measures, students complained of overwork yet felt underprepared to be practicing vets. Professors knew they weren’t teaching as effectively as they could be. Things needed to change.

If this were a tale of conventional curricular reform, it would involve months of committee meetings and cautious moves forward, most of it carried about by the college’s faculty and staff members. But Michigan State has placed a big bet on a different approach: one that blends interdepartmental collaboration, academic technology, and new forms of pedagogy. Two years ago it pulled these strands together to create the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, often just called the hub. And one of its first clients was the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Instead of working within the confines of the college, Michigan State brought together disciplinary experts from the veterinary faculty with specialists in learning and instructional design who encouraged them to think differently, take risks, and move quickly. More than 70 faculty members are now participating in a complete revamp of the doctor of veterinary medicine program. Starting this fall, incoming students will be introduced to a new curriculum that includes three-week course modules, a competency-based approach, team teaching, and flipped classrooms.

“Without having that structure of the hub, we wouldn’t have been this courageous,” says Julie Funk, associate dean for professional academic programs and student success at the college. “There’s still faculty who doubt we’re going to pull it off.”

A 2015 survey found that a growing number of colleges were marrying their academic-technology units with their teaching and learning centers in hopes of igniting fundamental reforms across campus. A common mission for innovation centers, particularly at large public universities like Michigan State, is improving student success. That may include revamping large introductory courses, training professors in design thinking and active learning, and using analytics to improve retention and graduation rates.

But can you engineer innovation? Advocates believe so, arguing that traditional campus structures and systems discourage change and limit creative thinking. Faculty members have little time to explore pedagogical research or figure out which classroom technologies work for them. Departments aren’t always aware of how other divisions are tackling curricular reform. And systemic challenges, like student retention, require the coordination of many departments across campus.

But whether these hubs can foster systemic change is another question. Skeptics argue that innovation centers wear their own sets of blinders. Versed in the lingo of Silicon Valley, the staff may turn off more traditionally minded academics with talk of iteration and technological solutionism. And if they are set apart from the daily work of campus, innovation centers risk becoming their own silos.

The lessons of MOOC mania linger, with academic leaders taking a more skeptical view of the idea that education technology can transform higher education and bring in new sources of revenue. Some centers started in that era, around 2012, with grand ambitions but lacking clear goals. And if colleges are unable to calculate the impact these centers are supposed to have, they’re more likely to lose support when times are tough, says MJ Bishop, director of the Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation at the University System of Maryland and co-author of the 2015 survey.

In short, without the resources, relationships, and high-level support to simultaneously work within and help rethink existing systems, innovation centers can easily overpromise and underdeliver.

Michigan State hopes to avoid those trip wires by structuring the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology as a fluid organization, designed not to lead change, but to act as a catalyst. Housed on the ground floor of Wells Hall, the largest academic building on campus, the hub is an open space, literally and figuratively. Boards lined with notes and timelines stretch along a hallway dubbed Main Street, tracking the status of continuing projects. There are no offices. All staff members work at tables, grabbing whatever space is available. Visitors are welcome: Anyone can stop by to work on a project or ask for advice.

Jeff Grabill, the hub’s director and an associate provost for teaching, learning, and technology, was asked by Michigan State’s provost, June Pierce Youatt, to create an entity that would blend technology and pedagogical innovation, but she left it to him to work out the details. Ms. Youatt calls the hub “a support system for people with big ideas,” specifically those that tie into the university’s longstanding efforts to improve student success.

A lot of innovation centers prefer collaborating with faculty members who are early adopters of new technologies, says Mr. Grabill, a professor of rhetoric and writing who helped create an education-technology company from research he had done on digital writing. He is more interested, he says, in sparking broader reforms. Michigan State’s portfolio includes several ambitious projects, such as rethinking general-education courses, improving student advising, and helping devise a cocurricular record system. It’s the kind of work that most everyone agrees is important but often fails to get off the ground.

“In many respects,” he says, “our portfolio is fundamentally unsexy.”

The staff is small — a collection of learning and instructional designers, media-production specialists, and educational-technology experts — with some on loan from other divisions. Mr. Grabill says he created a lean operation in part to avoid discontent from others on campus who might see the hub as a drain on resources. He added the equivalent of two full-time positions, with most of the rest of the staff reassigned from other divisions.

Project teams are formed ad hoc, pulling in people from other parts of campus. The organizational fluidity is central to the hub’s strategy, says Karen L. Klomparens, a member of its board and a senior adviser to the provost. “A lot of times we academics overthink things,” she says. “Everything has to be planned out and in an org chart. And that sometimes just kills innovation.”

The hub helped start a learning-analytics group, for example, that brought together people from the registrar’s office, institutional research, technology, student services, and the provost’s office.

That group provided an early success story when it identified a key problem: Fewer incoming freshmen were taking a full course load their first semester. The decline, in fact, had been precipitous. From a high of 44 percent in 2006, it had dropped to 28 percent last year. Mark Largent, an associate dean and the director of learning analytics, who heads up the group, says the administration didn’t realize how drastic the drop was until his team crunched the numbers.

Further analysis showed that students who take a full course load have stronger academic records and graduate more quickly than those who don’t. Armed with that information, the learning-analytics team organized focus groups of students to find out what message would resonate with them. It turns out it wasn’t the tuition they would save so much as the fact that they would start college on strong academic footing. The team worked with advising staff to develop a campaign called Go Green, Go 15, to sell that idea. The percentage of students taking 15 or more credits jumped back up this fall, to 42 percent.

Mr. Largent credits Mr. Grabill for providing the accelerant to the group’s work. “He says if you’re going to fail, fail fast. He pushes hard in the beginning.”

The College of Veterinary Medicine is being pushed hardest of all. Its leaders approached the hub in early 2016 seeking guidance on the doctor of veterinary medicine degree. The college is highly ranked, and graduates do well on licensing exams, but faculty members worried that the curriculum was not as coherent as they wished and that they were cramming information in students’ heads rather than training them to think like clinicians.

The college decided on a wholesale makeover: a competency-based curriculum with courses organized around core skills and concepts like clinical reasoning and decision-making. The change will require sustained collaboration among faculty members to remap the entire four-year sequence. The competency-based approach also requires new forms of teaching and assessment, as professors move away from the traditional model of lectures followed by quizzes and exams.

This year begins the hard work of course design and production. Stephen Thomas, a curriculum developer based out of the College of Natural Sciences, was brought in last fall to help coordinate the development of 13 new three-week courses. He spends about a third of his time working with other experts from the hub, in instructional design, faculty development, and academic technology. Together with teams of veterinary faculty members, they wrestle with big questions: How do you create courses that emphasize critical thinking, not simply memorization? How do you build curricular coherence, so that courses logically flow from one to the next? How do you determine whether students can make sound decisions amid uncertainty?

Mr. Thomas, who holds a doctorate in entomology and evolutionary biology, says the experience is an education for him as well: His expertise is in digital instruction, yet the project has taught him about competency-based approaches and professional development. He is also seeing firsthand the barriers to curricular reform. “Time has been the continual challenge,” he says. “Faculty who are already very engaged and invested in the clinic and teaching and research — how do you give them the time and space to work on this?” These are the kinds of structural concerns, he says, that the hub can bring to the attention of senior university leaders.

Ioana Sonea, an associate professor who teaches pathobiology, is part of the group that’s redesigning the first course, on the musculoskeletal system. Her group began meeting in December at the hub, where they discussed the competencies the course must cover, the best way to assess students, and how to train instructors in these new forms of teaching. Many of the answers are still in play, but Dr. Sonea, who is on eight of the 13 new course-design teams, gives the hub credit for keeping her group focused on the larger goals. For example, when it came to assessments, her colleagues from the hub reminded her that communication is one of the goals of the course. So instead of using exams, she is building in case reports — in which students are presented with test results, a diagnosis, and treatment plans for a sick animal and must summarize what they’ve learned — something that is normally reserved for later years. “I probably wouldn’t have thought of that on my own without their help,” she says.

Other departments are working on different projects, such as rethinking the large introductory lecture. Down the hall from the hub, Jonathan Weaver plays to a tough crowd of more than 600 students. A number of them look as if they’d rather be elsewhere.

One December afternoon, Mr. Weaver is reviewing various psychological disorders, like generalized anxiety and phobias, in his introductory psychology course. His tone is sincere and brisk. His descriptions are short and peppered with relatable examples: a movie clip of Jack Nicholson obsessively washing his hands, or the story of a friend whose brother came home from Iraq with PTSD and subsequently killed himself. He gives pop-up quizzes to make sure students are paying attention.

But lecture halls are easy places to hide, especially in the back. There, undergraduates are hunched over phones, earbuds in and hoods up. A young woman in the last row watches Grey’s Anatomy, stops to click her answer to the quiz questions, and returns to her show.

“This is something that keeps me up at night,” Mr. Weaver, an assistant professor, says later. “I feel sometimes I’m just doing a pony show up there.”

For Michigan State, Mr. Weaver’s struggles embody a campuswide challenge: How do you make the large lecture class more engaging? He only has one teaching assistant, so he is limited in how much he can restructure the class. To find answers, Mr. Weaver has been working with Sarah Gretter, a learning designer at the hub, as part of a departmental effort to revamp the 101 gateway course. Roughly 10 percent of the students in the course earn a C or less, and previous efforts to help these low performers, with direct emails and clicker technology, have had limited or no success.

Mr. Weaver says conversations with Ms. Gretter and others at the hub have helped him and others in the department design strategies based on research, not just intuition: “We’d bring ideas and the hub would go, Oh, yeah, here’s some data that backs that or doesn’t back that.” He also credits weekly conversations with Ms. Gretter for giving him ideas that don’t require many resources. “One of the barriers I kept hearing from students who weren’t doing well was that they didn’t know anyone in class,” he says. He and Ms. Gretter are adding small, mandatory online study groups to the class this semester. They will also train some undergraduates as “learning assistants” to help monitor the groups and report to the main teaching assistant. The hope, he says, is to build connections among the students themselves.

Unlike with the veterinary college, Mr. Weaver and Ms. Gretter decided to try one change at a time to see what works. If there’s no difference in performance compared with the fall course, they’ll try other interventions that focus on materials or teaching style.

Mr. Weaver is optimistic that, as he and others work with the hub, more fundamental changes, like hiring new instructors who put a priority on engaging students, will follow. “It takes a long time in academia for people to embrace things,” he says. “Once people see others trying, it’s going to get them trying too.”

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the hub’s approach. Steve Weiland’s office is a five-minute walk from the hub, inside the College of Education. Just as his narrow office, stacked with papers and books, is strikingly different from the hub’s open spaces and sticky notes, so are his views toward innovation centers.

A longtime faculty member, Mr. Weiland sits on the hub’s board but says he often feels like he’s the only skeptic of the bunch. How can a centralized unit — one preaching innovation but lacking disciplinary expertise — break down academic silos, he wonders. Equally troublesome, he says, is the presumption he feels emanates from the hub’s proponents: that they can innovate their way through some of the most intractable challenges in higher education. Maybe, he says, they shouldn’t be asking what kind of technology can connect students in a 600-student lecture course, but why does Michigan State have so many large lecture courses in the first place?

“There’s not enough criticism and skepticism built into the way we do things,” says Mr. Weiland. “Part of being a research university is to ask these tough questions.”

He is supportive of curricular-reform efforts and says technology plays an important role in higher education — he teaches online himself — but wants to see the hub hold an “intellectual profile, not just an operational profile.” He would like to see the hub spark conversations on campus, for example, about the role of laptops in the classroom, the limits of learning analytics, and the impact of social media on students.

Instead, he says innovation-philes on campus “talk in the imagery of the Stanford Design School. They iterate and all that. You get some Silicon Valley-style bullying going on now.”

Academics at other institutions who study innovation echo some of these concerns. Innovation centers are susceptible to failure if they don’t clearly identify goals, integrate their work into campus life, and prove their worth.

“We developed a lot of these centers and programs and positions without a strong understanding of how to go about measuring impact and return on investment,” says Ms. Bishop, director of Maryland’s Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation. As a result, she says, when budgets get cut, or new leaders come in, these centers are often among the first to go.

That’s what happened with the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning. Created in 2012, when interest in MOOCs was rapidly growing, the Texas Board of Regents decided it needed such an organization to better shape the future of the system.

The institute, led by Steven Mintz, a history professor from the flagship campus in Austin, had a broad and ambitious agenda similar to Michigan State’s: to help make education more accessible and affordable, improve student outcomes, and support technology-enhanced education.

Because it was regent-driven, says Mr. Mintz, the institute faced an uphill battle from the start. Some campuses resented the money being funneled into the institute — nearly $100 million in all — while others weren’t convinced of the value of its proposed projects. It was also expected to be financially self-supporting, says Mr. Mintz, although it was never quite clear how. Then, he says, “the clock ran out before we could get there.”

As new regents came in, skepticism toward the institute and its mission grew, with some looking back on what they considered overly rosy and vague promises to “define the future of higher education.” The center will shut its doors at the end of this month, says Mr. Mintz, with some of its projects shifting to the University of Texas at Austin.

He offers some advice to others embarking on similar efforts. Make sure there is widespread agreement on what problems need to be solved or opportunities should be pursued. Otherwise, don’t move forward. Everyone’s expectations also need to be properly calibrated, he says. The UT system wanted change to happen quickly, which the institute couldn’t provide.

Finally, he says, you need to have the talent and the money to do what you set out to do. “Whether a central unit can attract the level of expertise and have the resources is going to be a big question at a place like Michigan State,” he says. “I know a lot of leaders of comparable centers, and I think they share very similar challenges.”

Now entering its third year, Michigan State’s Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology is extending its reach. It is working with the College of Arts and Letters to redesign study abroad. It is helping the math department rethink remedial education. It is working across departments to revise required discipline-based writing courses.

The plan, says Mr. Grabill, is to branch out across the campus, getting buy-in from academic leaders and others to spark more systemic reforms. He agrees with Mr. Weiland that the hub needs to raise its intellectual profile. To that end, he plans to use it as a forum for faculty members to discuss big ideas in higher education, like the future of digital learning.

For now, optimism among its advocates tends to run high. “They’re great at things I don’t do well,” says Walter Hawthorne, chair of the history department and one of the people involved the writing-course revamp, “which is to break down territorialism and get people talking.”

Mr. Largent, the learning-analytics director, is on to the next phase of his project: restructuring the course-scheduling system so that students aren’t shut out of classes. He’s confident that his team can remove some of the barriers that have made course scheduling a headache for so long.

None of these changes will be quick or easy, Mr. Grabill notes. Substantive reform takes time. “That’s a really important thing about innovation work,” he says. “It looks bright and shining from the outside. But if that’s all you’re doing, there will be no change.”