Executive Retreat: Building and Managing a High-performance Enrollment and Retention System
Next Retreat: February 26 through 28, 2008
This is the only planned 2008 Retreat addressing content development and management. Call us to explore the fit between this Retreat and your specific goals.
InterEd's Executive Retreats are invitation-only two or three-day experiences held in our private facility in the beautiful and pristine Idaho mountains. Participants are presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other leaders of adult-centered and professional programs. All retreats provide the vision, executive blueprints, and materials needed for innovative change and the related growth. These one-of-a-kind events began in 2003 as a one-time response to a specific challenge and grew into one of our favorite services. We find the Executive Retreats to be an engaging and fun way to deliver lasting value and build lasting friendships.
Main Meeting Room at InterEd North
The agenda will be guided but the emphasis and personal attention is always on addressing your specific opportunities and challenges for innovation. The entire experience — from early morning walks around the lake to post-dinner discussions — will be one of informative interaction that most leaders find richer than one-on-one sessions and vastly more useful than the large meeting format of a conference or workshop.
Between Vision and Execution
Innovation leading to for-profit caliber growth begins with vision and ends with skillful execution borne of deep experience. InterEd's Executive Retreats provide the time, space, structured guidance, stimulating environment, and bit of fun required to nurture your vision and inform your plans for innovation. You'll get specific strategies, action items, and collateral materials.
Small, Engaging, and (occasionally) Irreverent
These retreats are small, engaging meetings of six to a maximum of eight selected leaders in adult-centered and professional higher education. In the words of our participants, the first day's sessions are out of the box, back in the box, intense, stimulating, (at times) irreverent, and deeply horizon-widening. By late morning of day two, you will begin forging a link between the elements of vision, strategy, tactics, and the "devil is in the details" business of management, operations, and logistics. You will leave the retreat with a concrete plan to re-engineer in your chosen direction.
This Is Not a Conference or Workshop
“Easily smarter and more useful to me than any ten conferences I have attended, including all of the largest ones.”
. . . are the words of a Vice President and Provost of one of the largest state systems reflecting on the depth, clarity, and practicality of the ideas presented and the possibilities that the experience created for his system.
The Environment
InterEd's Executive Retreats are held in our new facility tucked away in the beautiful mountains and lakes near the resort community of McCall, Idaho (west of the Frank Church National Wilderness Area). The air is clear and crisp; the views are stunning; the surroundings are new and comfortable; the food, drink, and conversation promise to be memorable; your needs are attended to in a way that creates an environment conducive to achievement.
Leadership
Unless otherwise noted, your retreat will be led by Robert W. Tucker, Ph.D., founder and president of InterEd, former senior Vice President of the University of Phoenix, former Executive Vice President of UNext (Cardean Graduate School & Ellis College). Co-facilitators will include senior colleagues of Dr. Tucker’s selected to add value to the retreat experience.
Retreat Content
This Retreat will be tons of fun and painless insight for any senior decision-maker who is undecided, perhaps even balancing on the edge of annoyed, about the hype-free implications of processes such as reusable learning objects, scalable content, reusable content, or (?) repurposable content. The same is true for you advanced content management buffs who know that SCORM is not a blurry-eyed term of derision. Notice that I didn't mention Durable Objects™ because that term belongs to InterEd. We use it to refer to our pedagogically elegant yet low cost approach to content development and management.
View of the Front -- InterEd North
Building a Cost-effective Reusable Content System
The practical alternative to InterEd's Durable Objects™ approach is defined by the SCORM standards. Initially a great idea, the compromises SCORM underwent to meet the objections of various guilds have reduced the potentially robust notion of a Learning Object to little more than a well-classified library resource. This useful first step does little to address the challenge of modern learning environments and less still to exploit the programmatic or financial leverage made possible through the application of technology. The high-end frontier is represented by interests who have $5-10M to invest in Oracle systems and a backroom of dedicated programmers. A number of the largest for-profit universities, corporate universities, and publishers are moving in this direction.
The middle-ground represented by InterEd's Durable Objects™ model is otherwise unaddressed. This position focuses on the end-product of having a working and scalable content engine that organizes and deploys curriculum of demonstrable high quality (assessment metrics are built in) and, over time, does so in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost required via conventional methods. InterEd's Durable Objects™ approach develops business rules, systems infrastructure, roles, and metrics that will create and sustain a working system for programs whose human and technical resources are modest. Equally important, we think, is the organizational and technical guidance we provide to achieve an effective migration from your current method of developing and managing content, including unmanaged, instructor-centric systems.