Use the back button to return to the previous page

Innovation Exchange Homepage        Send AQIP mail

The AQIP Innovation Exchange is a website providing direct, free, open access to a growing encyclopedia of Innovative Practices in contemporary higher education.

Visitors to the Website can read, print, all Innovative Practices freely, and email selected practices to colleagues. Visitors can also rate (once) the value of each Innovative Practice listed and comment on it. After a practice has been rated three or more times, its average rating will appear in searches, as will the collected comments contributed by visitors.

All contents of the Innovation Exchange will be indexed by Google and other search engines, so World-Wide-Web Internet searches will find specific practices listed.

The Innovation Exchange is designed to help colleges and universities searching to find or benchmark "best practices" they can adopt, and to find the people who can assist them in doing so. It provides a resource directory of the best ideas for running a higher education organization, gathered from cutting-edge, innovative, effective, and efficient colleges and universities.

AQIP moderates the Innovation Exchange, inspecting what each institution writes about a practice before publishing it and asking for modification if a description sounds like advertising or contains too much hype.

Each institution is responsible for updating the Innovative Practices it has published. Updating is appropriate if the contact person changes, if the institution discovers a practice was less (or more) useful than it thought, or if an institution begins to amass solid data on the performance of a Innovative Practice.

AQIP works diligently to publicize the existence of this resource with brochures, press releases, emails, etc. We want to focus a lot of attention on it, because it represents the strengths and accomplishments of our institutions, and they deserve credit for all they have accomplished.

AQIP, or the Academic Quality Improvement Program, is an accrediting program of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. AQIP blends continuous quality improvement principles with accrediation requirements and processes. Learn more about AQIP by visiting its website at www.AQIP.org.

The Academic Quality Program's mission obligates it to help its participating quality-focused colleges and universities share the successful innovations, initiatives, and improvements that they have developed with the higher education community, nationally and internationally. The achievements of AQIP institutions committed to continuous improvement represent the best of the best in higher education, and sharing these Innovative Practices celebrates the outstanding colleges and universities responsible for them while stimulating overall improvement in the quality of higher education.

The Systems Appraisal Feedback Report prepared for each AQIP institution every four years identifies practices that the Appraisal team believes represents strengths (SS or S) of the institution. From these, AQIP asks each institution to select at least one (and up to three) to describe in detail as Innovative Practices. These are what AQIP posts on its website and encourages educators across the country to read. The processes leading to their publication ensures they are accurate reports of institutional strengths.

Thus, every Innovative Practice described here was first recognized by a review team consisting of experts in quality management, working as part of the Academic Quality Improvement Programs accrediting processes. AQIP then invited each institution identified to supply details of its Innovative Practice that would assist others in appreciating the practice and determining whether adopting or adapting it to a different college or university makes sense.

In addition, AQIP strives to make those who influence public policy aware that these practices testify to the strength and vitality of US higher education. AQIP works to publicize the Innovation Exchange and its contents.

Use the "View" command in your browser's toolbar to change or zoom the text size that your browser displays. On many browsers, and <+> (or and <+>) will increase the size of displayed text.

When an institution posts a Innovative Practice on the AQIP Directory, it must answer ten standard questions. The questions are designed to help facilitate searches of the website (e.g., people can search for practices that respond to "remedial programs" or "developmental" if those words appear anywhere in the description), so AQIP must make sure one or another of the responses includes the keywords that are likely to be used in searches.

Only authorized representatives of colleges and universities participating in the Academic Quality Improvement Program may post Innovative Practices on the Innovation Exchange. If you register as a contributor to the Innovation Exchange, you can describe an Innovative Practice (a strength labeled SS or S in your Systems Appraisal Feedback Report) that AQIP identified in your institution. To do so, AQIP must first approve your status as a "contributor" on the Innovation Exchange, so you need to specify, when you register, where in your insttution's last Systems Appraisal we can find the Innovative Practice (SS or S) that you wish to describe and post.

Un der the category "Samples," you can study the specific questions you must answer in posting an Innovative Practice, and look at a sample Innovative Practice that AQIP has described to model the length and specificity it wants to see in published descriptions.

You should realize that the practices you describe will generate intense interest, and that you may well get calls from other educators asking you to consult with them as they work to adopt or adapt your practice to their institution. How you respond to such calls is your business; you don't need to get AQIP's approval to provide help free or charge for it, but we would like you to share the influence these practices ultimately have. You can do so by returning to the Innovation Exchange and updating the Innovative Practice that you posted.