Bridget Burns’ Guest Appearance on An Educated Guest Podcast

In this interview, Bridget responded to questions from the host of the Educated Guest, Todd Zipper.

They discussed the goals and purpose behind the University Innovation Alliance, Bridget’s personal connection to the work, and what she and the UIA have learned over the past 9 years together.

She focused on the need to prioritize empathy, which she clarified as being the first step of design. While higher education institutions desire to improve and adapt, one of the biggest challenges they face is an uncoordinated and sporadic approach to capturing empathy to understand the perspective of students across a variety of perspectives. Even when institutions hear of a student's experience, they struggle with a process to capture, categorize and follow up with the vast array of problems being surfaced. The constant reactive/defensive approach higher education has taken to the task of improvement has left campuses incapable of broader systemic redesign. This is all caused by a broader, fundamental challenge: higher education was never designed around students. The UIA works in a variety of ways to elevate and advance on improving the student experience by shifting data systems, advising, using technology like chatbots, etc. Bridget shared about some of the lessons UIA has learned from implementing predictive analytics and proactive advising.

Other perspectives she shared include how much higher education can learn from failure and how much the sector needs to change its mindset about failure as a teaching tool. Aversion to risk and an inclination to reduce any potential failure prevents learning and reflection. Real collective growth can occur when people aren’t afraid to share their failures with others. In a world where everyone wants to pretend they have it all together, Bridget calls it the ultimate act of generosity when institutions share their failures for others to learn from. She shared the Michigan State process mapping story when they mapped out what happened from the time a student gets admitted to the day they start on campus. Sharing their failures with the alliance has allowed other universities to map out where their failures are, so they can actively fix them.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why higher ed was never designed around student success.
• How empathy and designed thinking are keys to change.
• How chatbots can help staff be more effective.
• How creating the social safety to fail is key to institutions innovating successfully.

Favorite Quote:

“If the university is a body, where is the ear?” -Bridget Burns