This week, I am attending the Annual ITC Leadership Academy in Eugene. Oregon. Lane Community College is this year’s host – and Ian Coronado is our “host with the most”. Somehow, Ian has persuaded the Northwest weather to be outstanding, and the sessions are off to a wonderful start. And you can only imagine how picturesque the Lane Community College campus is.
The ITC Board views the annual leadership academy as perhaps our best benefit of membership. The academy was launched in 2009, partnering with Costa Mesa Community College in California. In the years since, we have traversed the country to bring the academy closer to our members in all regions of the US. We even hosted an academy in Charlottetown, PEI Canada in 2014. Over the past seventeen years, we have held academies in California, Maine, Colorado (2), Nevada, Oregon (2), Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina (2), and Florida (2) and Prince Edward Island Canada.
The training – and the academy experience – is outstanding. It has a focus on EdTech and Distance Learning BUT it covers key topics critical to developing leadership skills and offers individualized leadership and skills plan. Participants also identify a capstone specific project at their institution to work on. As you can imagine, we have received very positive reviews from attendees and regularly hear success stories from our academy alumni as they have made significant progress with their careers. They also have been able to demonstrate more confidence and leadership skills essential to their success.
A tip of my hat (really, more of euphemism; I really don’t wear a hat. If you’ve met me, you understand the dilemma of a very large head in a world of very small hats) to our outstanding colleagues that comprise this year’s leadership faculty: Brittany Waggoner Hochsaetter (ITC chair), Cynthia Krutsinger (ITC chair-elect), Leslie Van Wolvelear (ITC Treasurer and Leadership Academy organizer), Kellie Schellenberg (ITC past-chair), Ian Coronado (ITC board member/host), and ITC board members Josie Milliken, Matt Evins, Chad McKenzie, Richard Senker, Nadine Edwards, Cynthia Pascal, and Fred Lokken. We were also joined by Dana Salkowsky (SUNY Orange)
We will wrap up on Wednesday night with a recognition banquet. And the dates and location of the 2027 ITC Leadership Academy will be formally announced at the National ITC eLearning Conference, March 4-7th and hosted by Pike’s Peak State College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Please let me know if you have any questions about the leadership academy.
Recommended Reading
AI’s job disruption for graduates may be exaggerated - for now, University Business Magazine
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The AI literacy gap no one anticipated, Campus Technology
Familiarity with generative AI is not the same as literacy. While Gen Z may be advanced at generating quick outputs or using free LLMs for surface-level tasks, they need to develop critical thinking, communication, and analysis skills. Survey data specifics
“Raise Us” is a rare positive development in AI transformation, Inside Higher Ed
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Beyond Governance: purpose, ethics, visibility, assurance and compliance in the age of AI, eCampus News
In the age of AI, governance is about ensuring that institutions remain capable of directing what intelligent systems are helping them become
Future-ready strategies for technology leaders in higher education, EdTech Magazine
Modernizing higher education demands stronger data foundations, disciplined governance and investments aligned with institutional priorities.
The current start of play: AI in higher education and the road ahead
Artificial intelligence is reshaping higher education, exposing weaknesses in assessment, curriculum, and institutional strategy. Ten critical challenges reveal why incremental change will not suffice and why colleges and universities must rethink their strategy, culture, and purpose.
Video of the Week
The different levels of how Claude thinks, YouTube
Out of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible — thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside our AI model, Claude. Our experiments were inspired by a leading theory in neuroscience: the global workspace theory. It holds that a thought becomes consciously accessible when it enters a shared "workspace" that's broadcast across the brain. We found a set of representations in Claude’s neural activity that play a similar role.
