Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵAPP President Mark Lombardi, PhD, is one of the most dynamic and candid leaders in higher education. At Maryville, he creates models for higher education transformation at a pace more common in the entrepreneurial world than in education.
Lombardi shares more about how Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵAPPis driving the future of education in the new podcast, which features conversations with Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵAPPfaculty, staff and other change agents in the higher education industry. Subscribe and listen to episodes on ´Ç°ùÌý.
Please enjoy a teaser from the inaugural episode featuring two Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵAPP professors: Dustin York, EdD, associate professor of communication and a sought-after communication and innovation specialist, and Matt Raithel, professor of practice of game design and owner and studio director of Graphite Lab, a mobile game design company.
LOMBARDI: Universities traditionally, when they want to go in a direction, think that they have to go at it alone. But we know here at Maryville, and I’m curious about your thoughts, about how to partner with cutting-edge industries and how to bring them into the process?
RAITHEL: I’m going to keep using games as an example. Every product we produce has between nine to 12 third-party integrations in it. We’re talking about things that manage the back-end data, they might manage the advertising. We never go at it alone. So, to me, it seems short-sighted for someone like a university to have the same approach. Why keep everything in? If you want to talk about innovating the process versus inventing a tool; if the mission is to make a data tool, then fine, keep everything in. But if your mission is to really transform the student experience, why not bring in from the outside?
YORK: I think a lot of universities, not at Maryville, have an issue, a hurdle they’re facing: they’re living in an ivory tower. They think they can do it by themselves. We have to get past that thinking! Amazon is amazing. Amazon doesn’t just create e-gaming by itself, they go out and partner with Twitch — and then they buy Twitch — but they bring out the experts in that field. They don’t just say, “Oh, we’ll create from scratch and we’ll dominate.” They don’t say that. I think higher ed is the exact same. We need to say, “What is this xyz organization doing? Apple — what are they doing? What is Salesforce doing? What are these organizations doing? We partner with them and that is just an explosion of innovation that a university can maybe do in 20 years that we instead can do in three months.
Subscribe on or , and watch the video+audio version on YouTube. Here are the first two episodes – let us know what you think!