Meta Innovation: Reimagining the Student Experience for Miami’s Future Workforce
By University of Miami President Julio Frenk
The global challenges over the past two years have disrupted how we teach, learn, and live, but they have not stopped us from innovating, creating, and adapting. We must view the disruption of the pandemic as an opportunity to accelerate necessary change and put into focus areas of growth that need attention.
The end of the pandemic phase of COVID-19 has come as Miami turns a moment of opportunity into a movement around technology, and we are uniquely positioned to embrace the challenge. The economy, how people interact both professionally and personally, our ability to address complex challenges, and democracy are all rapidly changing with the evolution of technology.
To that end, the University of Miami (UM) is focusing on what we call ‘meta innovation’ — innovating education to equip the next generation of innovators in every field. UM is a private research university with South Florida’s only academic health system, dedicated to the pursuit of positive change through the transformative power of people and ideas. Our vibrant and diverse community of students, faculty members, and health care providers is focused on teaching and learning, discovering new knowledge, and service to the South Florida region and beyond.
Innovating education and preparing the next generation includes investing more in research to advance the science of learning and in assessment to perfect the art of teaching. Our objective is to evolve the standard of educational practice by reimagining higher education.
One step we recently took was to create the position of vice provost for educational innovation, who is responsible for designing the University’s strategy in leading the educational revolution and its execution. The vice provost coordinates the Platform for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (PETAL), a facilitating group that offers resources for faculty members to improve their instructional skills, and oversees the University’s Quality Enhancement Plan, which serves to improve student learning through dialogue and discussion-based learning in undergraduate courses, among other critical strategies.
The development of our New Century Educational Incubator is another important piece of our innovation strategy. This incubator, made up of 13 Academic Innovation Fellows, is an effort to revolutionize the undergraduate experience by testing ideas, assessing them, and mainstreaming them. This is a common practice in health care: we develop new treatments, test them, and then incorporate the most effective cutting-edge approaches into our standard of care to better serve our patients. Similarly, we must intentionally cultivate a student-focused approach to the structure and delivery of the curriculum. We must be able to experiment in the classroom but do so rigorously, take smart risks, evaluate the outcomes of our trials, and mainstream the most effective methods.
As the first initiative of the New Century Educational Incubator, the fellows — accomplished faculty from across seven of our schools and colleges — are working on outlining a new, accelerated interdisciplinary degree program focused on entrepreneurship, innovation, and design thinking. The focus of the program is to equip students to generate ideas that center on benefits to humanity. It will take a hybrid approach, with in-person and online classes, experiential learning opportunities, and many individual and team projects. Students will get hands-on experience through partnerships with global and local businesses, nonprofits, and civic institutions, and use cutting-edge technology. Any models of success from this program that help improve instruction, engagement, or the student experience will be mainstreamed into the University’s existing curriculum.
We aim to become a national model by empowering our students, alumni, and community to engage in education and partner with us throughout their lives. A graduation date does not have to mark the end of learning. This initiative embraces the promising and increasingly necessary universe of lifelong learning, the practice of continuing to learn throughout one’s life, especially outside formal schooling. To uphold the University’s commitment to being a learning partner for life, we have developed a series of cost-free programs, including Massive Open Online Courses and other skill-based training via cross-University partnerships that offer a long-term value proposition to our alumni network.
There is no doubt the technological revolution is affecting higher education. Most perceive higher education institutions as too slow to change and unresponsive to the rapid pace of innovation. We, in academia, are often criticized by society for preaching change to others but being very slow to change ourselves. We must prove our critics wrong.
Whether we like it or not, disruption is happening and if we fail to adapt, we will be left behind. Either we let disruption happen to us or we make disruption happen by us. I prefer the latter option.
We have an opportunity to seize the Miami “moment turned movement” — one of the hottest tech scenes today — and lead the disruption. The world is rapidly changing, and we are deliberately accelerating the pace at which we drive innovation in the classroom. We have already taken critical first steps and will continue to innovate, iterate, and reimagine the student experience for an ever-changing world.
This is what leading the educational revolution looks like.
This is the first of an ongoing series with Opportunity Miami’s Academic Leaders Council, which includes the presidents of the University of Miami, Miami Dade College, Florida International University, Florida Memorial University, St. Thomas University, and Barry University, along with the Superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The essay series, called “The Class of 2040: Essays on the next-generation workforce,” explores how we will meet the talent development needs of the future. Opportunity Miami is powered by Miami-Dade Beacon Council.
