Faculty-Led AI at Scale: From UC Santa Barbara to the California Community Colleges
Changing Higher Ed
At UC Santa Barbara, Kavitta Ghai recalls, students waited two days, on average, to get a question answered. For a student whose scholarship was just pulled or whose tuition is due tomorrow, that is too long, and at community colleges, she notes, most classrooms have no teaching assistant at all. She argues AI can now offer the round-the-clock support students have never had, if it is built and governed the right way. In this episode of the , speaks with , CEO and Co-Founder of Nectir. The conversation covers why faculty-led adoption works, how to guardrail AI at the course level, and how to...
info_outline
AI Guardrails for Universities: Why an AI Policy Needs a Tech Stack to Enforce It
Changing Higher Ed
Most AI risk at a university does not start with a hacker. It starts with a student, a faculty member, or a researcher copying something out of the learning management system and pasting it into a personal AI account, where every safeguard written into the institution's enterprise licenses no longer applies. In this episode of the , speaks with , Vice President of SLED (State, Local Government, and Education) at Island. The conversation covers the three AI issues facing presidents: academic integrity, compliance around sensitive data, and responsible AI use aligned with institutional...
info_outline
FIRE's 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: What Actually Moves a School's Score
Changing Higher Ed
Texas A&M holds a green light rating for its speech policies and still fell from 47th to 192nd in this year's College Free Speech Rankings. Harvard climbed from 245th to 71st without changing a single policy, a sign that how leadership responds to speech controversies matters more than what is written in the handbook. In this episode of the , speaks with , Chief Research Advisor at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The conversation covers the seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings and why institutions with strong written policies can still see their free...
info_outline
Washington Update: Title IV Risk, Neg Reg, and the Midterms
Changing Higher Ed
Student loan default and repayment rates have continued to be calculated through years of dormant collections, and some institutions could soon face single-year default rates high enough to threaten their Title IV eligibility. That risk is arriving alongside final OB3 rules, sweeping accreditation proposals from the AIM negotiated rulemaking, and midterm elections that will reshape every committee governing higher education. In this Washington Update episode of the , speaks with Tom Netting, President of TEN Government Strategies. The conversation covers the federal regulatory and political...
info_outline
How Gies Gives Every Junior a Live Client Project
Changing Higher Ed
Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog. In this episode of the , speaks with , Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it cost on the staffing, funding, and...
info_outline
Workforce Readiness: Why Higher Ed Struggles to Use Employer Support
Changing Higher Ed
Workforce readiness is usually framed as a funding and program-design problem. In some states and at some institutions, the funding and the employer willingness already exist, and what is missing is a structure on the institution's side that can take the offer and act on it. In this episode of the , speaks with , president of , a central Ohio technology firm building custom software for nonprofits, local governments, and growing organizations. The conversation covers where the public-private partnership between employers and institutions breaks down, and what leaders can change on their own...
info_outline
Diversifying Revenue Without Diluting Mission: Inside Rollins College's Innovation Triangle
Changing Higher Ed
Private colleges under enrollment pressure get told to diversify revenue. The venture that follows usually either fails to earn or drags the institution away from the academic identity families were paying for. In this episode of the , speaks with . The conversation covers how a tuition-dependent private structures a diversified budget model without compromising the curriculum that gives its degree value. Barnett walks through the Innovation Triangle, a three-part portfolio Rollins spent more than a decade and $200 million building. The parts run on deliberately different economics: a...
info_outline
Adult Learners: Redesign, Don't Just Recruit
Changing Higher Ed
Institutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers doing the damage are recent design decisions, not fixed features of higher education, and several of them cost almost nothing to remove. In this episode of the , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with , executive director of distance education at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. The conversation covers when adult learners stop being an enrollment...
info_outline
Reputation, Revenue, and the Cost of Silence in Higher Ed Communication
Changing Higher Ed
Most institutions in a crisis don't believe they're in one. The word calls up a scandal with a camera crew outside, and nothing on this week's agenda looks like that, so the answer is often no. In this episode of the , speaks with , founder and CEO of Red Banyan, a strategic communications firm built around high-stakes rapid response. The conversation covers why , and what that definition changes for colleges and universities. Nierman explains why the old instinct to stay quiet and avoid giving oxygen to a fire now cedes the battleground to whoever is willing to characterize your institution,...
info_outline
Why Is Enrollment Falling Short When Applications Are Up?
Changing Higher Ed
Applications keep climbing while the class comes up short. The gap sits in the phase most institutions treat as the finish line: what happens after the acceptance letter goes out. In this episode of the , speaks with , Vice President of Spark451, which he co-founded. is a Jenzabar company. The conversation covers why enrollment falls short when admissions and marketing are both performing. Drawing on twenty-five years in university marketing, branding, and enrollment marketing, McGetrick explains what Spark451's focus groups revealed about when families actually begin their due diligence,...
info_outlineMost institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. W. Brooke Elliott, Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it cost on the staffing, funding, and governance side to make it hold.
Elliott is starting her third year as dean in her twenty-fourth year at Gies, where the land-grant mission is expressed through a purpose statement committing the college to expanding access to business education. Her operational focus is on what accessibility means after enrollment: whether the live client projects, consulting engagements, and immersions inside a degree are reachable by a large share of learners rather than a selected few.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and deans evaluating whether to scale experiential learning beyond pilot programs and selective cohorts.
Topics Covered
- Redefining accessibility to include the experiences inside the degree, not just admission and price
- How Gies sources 300 to 400 live client projects a year to place every junior on a team
- Why undergraduate employer projects are free, and how project sourcing functions as the recruiting pipeline
- The staffing model: a dedicated experiential learning office paired with internal learning designers
- Embedding experiential capstones inside online graduate programs serving roughly 7,000 students
- Investing in faculty AI capability for 18 months before changing the curriculum
- The iMBA governance precedent that made current innovation move quickly
Real-World Examples Discussed
- Business 301, Business in Action, a junior-year course placing every student on a live client project, and Business 401, Crafting Your Purpose, sending seniors into their local and home communities
- Illinois Business Consulting, in its thirtieth year, and the Disruption Lab, which pairs Gies and Grainger College of Engineering students on technology problems sourced from inside the college
- International immersions redesigned into domestic and then virtual formats, including a virtual immersion with a partner institution in Japan
- Replacing programming-language modules in the undergraduate core with modules on using AI to program, and launching the MSBAi with a first cohort of 30
- Students correcting their assumptions about John Deere and Caterpillar by working the companies' actual problems
Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership
- Mission and purpose alignment only matters when it functions as a decision rule for resource allocation and program design.
- Learner-centric requires faculty first, because faculty deliver the experience. Invest in capability before expecting delivery.
- Leading authentically is what mobilizes people past what an org chart can compel, and disruption is where access expands if someone goes after it.
Read the transcript:
Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/scale-experiential-learning-to-every-student/
#ExperientialLearning #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast