University Innovation Fellows Answer the President’s Call for Information Accessibility
Last year the President outlined an ambitious plan to make a college education accessible for everyone. Part of the plan promotes innovation in providing information, tools and resources that help students make the most of their educational experience. At Epicenter, we believe the entrepreneurial mindset is a fundamentally important skill that must be a part of every student’s college experience. That’s why the University Innovation Fellows, students hand-picked by their institutions and trained to enhance the Innovation & Entrepreneurship ecosystem, rose to the call. Students created a wiki (universityinnovation.org) that ‘open sources’ a rich trove of information about courses, programs, tools and resources on their own campuses. This allows peers access to information about curricular and extracurricular opportunities that cut across a university’s schools, departments and centers. Students are able to navigate all available resources to cultivate their creative potential, nurture their innovative abilities and adopt an entrepreneurial mindset. In addition, Fellows and Faculty identify student-perceived gaps that can be bridged using new and creative methods. Panelists will describe strategies campuses can use to gather landscape information, ways to share the information and opportunities to engage students as part of the solution. Interactive discussion follows brief panel remarks allowing participants at campuses of different size and ecosystem maturity to discuss student engagement on their own campus.