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The Innovation Exchange is a website providing direct, free, open access to a growing encyclopedia of Innovative Practices in contemporary higher education. Its direct URL is http://www.HigherEducationInnovation.org/InnovationExchange/.

Visitors to the Innovation Exchange website can read, print, all Innovative Practices freely, and email selected practices to colleagues. Visitors can also rate (once) the value of each Innovative Practice listed and comment on it. After a practice has been rated three or more times, its average rating will appear in searches, as will the collected comments contributed by visitors.

All contents of the Innovation Exchange will be indexed by Google and other search engines, so World-Wide-Web Internet searches will find specific practices listed.

The Innovation Exchange is designed to help colleges and universities searching to find or benchmark "best practices" they can adopt, and to find the people who can assist them in doing so. It provides a resource directory of the best ideas for running a higher education organization, gathered from cutting-edge, innovative, effective, and efficient colleges and universities.

It is also designed to serve the institutions that came up with the "innovative practices" listed, giving them publicity and recognition for their accomplishments and the opportunity to help others who might want to follow their example and adapt their innovations.

Higher Education Innovation moderates the Innovation Exchange, inspecting what each institution writes about a practice before publishing it and asking for modification if a description sounds like advertising or contains too much hype.

Each institution is responsible for updating the Innovative Practices it has published. Updating is appropriate if the contact person changes, if the institution discovers a practice was less (or more) useful than it thought, or if an institution begins to amass solid data on the performance of a Innovative Practice.

Higher Education Innovation works diligently to publicize the existence of this resource with brochures, press releases, emails, etc. We want to focus a lot of attention on it, because it represents the strengths and accomplishments of contemporary higher education, and the institutions who did this work deserve credit for all they have accomplished.

AQIP, or the Academic Quality Improvement Program, is an accrediting program of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. AQIP blends continuous quality improvement principles with accrediation requirements and processes. Learn more about AQIP by visiting its website at www.AQIP.org.

The Academic Quality Program's mission obligates it to help its participating quality-focused colleges and universities share the successful innovations, initiatives, and improvements that they have developed with the higher education community, nationally and internationally. The achievements of AQIP institutions committed to continuous improvement represent the best of the best in higher education, and sharing these Innovative Practices celebrates the outstanding colleges and universities responsible for them while stimulating overall improvement in the quality of higher education.

These are not merely "good ideas" for improvement, but actual improvements that have been implemented and validated by observers or reviewers from outside the institution.

The Systems Appraisal Feedback Report prepared for each AQIP institution every four years identifies practices that the Appraisal team believes represents strengths (SS or S) of the institution. From these, AQIP asks each institution to select at least one (and up to three) to describe in detail as Innovative Practices. Similarly, AQIP Quality Checkup visits may identify other outstanding practices, and AQIP then asks each institution to write these up for the Innovation Exchange. Institutions that have had innovations cited by Baldrige Quality program reviews, ISO reviews, or other external review processes may also nominate these as Innovative Practice.

Thus, every Innovative Practice described here was first recognized by a review team consisting of experts in quality management, working as part of the Academic Quality Improvement Program or another quality review process. Each institution identified was then invited to supply details of its Innovative Practice that would assist others in appreciating the practice and determining whether adopting or adapting it to a different college or university makes sense.

These are what Higher Education Innovation posts on its website and encourages educators across the country to read. The processes leading to their publication ensures they are accurate reports of institutional strengths. In addition, Higher Education Innovation strives to make those who influence public policy aware that these practices testify to the strength and vitality of US higher education. Higher Education Innovation works to publicize the Innovation Exchange and its contents.

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When an institution posts a Innovative Practice on the Innovation Exchange, it must answer ten standard questions. The questions are designed to help facilitate searches of the website (e.g., people can search for practices that respond to "remedial programs" or "developmental" if those words appear anywhere in the description), so Higher Education Innovation must make sure one or another of the responses includes the keywords that are likely to be used in searches.

Any representative of a higher education institution may post Innovative Practices on the Innovation Exchange. Authorized representatives of colleges and universities participating in the Academic Quality Improvement Program are invited specifically to post Innovative Practices on the Innovation Exchange, but we also welcome contributions from colleges and universities NOT participating in AQIP.

If you register as a contributor to the Innovation Exchange, you can describe any Innovative Practice that an organization external to your institution identified as exemplary. To do so, the Innovation Exchange must first approve your status as a "writer" on the Innovation Exchange, so you need to specify, when you register, which external organization identified the Innovative Practice(s) that you wish to describe and post, and when this happened.

Under the category "Samples," you can study the specific questions you must answer in posting an Innovative Practice, and look at a sample Innovative Practice described to model the length and specificity the Innovation Exchange wants to see in published descriptions.

You should realize that the practices you describe will generate intense interest, and that you may well get calls from other educators asking you to consult with them as they work to adopt or adapt your practice to their institution. How you respond to such calls is your business; you don't need to get Higher Education Innovation's approval to provide help free or charge for it, but we would like you to share the influence these practices ultimately have. You can do so by returning to the Innovation Exchange and updating the Innovative Practice that you posted.