Eric Joyce, Marketing Specialist
@ericmjoyce

Next week marks the University of Michigan’s fourth annual Giving Blueday, a university wide-day of giving building upon the Giving Tuesday global movement.

This year not only marks U-M’s Bicentennial, but an explosive year of innovation across the University catalyzed by the Academic Innovation Initiative, a charge to the Office of Academic Innovation by the President and Provost’s office “to consider how U-M will lead the way for higher education through the information age and further strengthen our impact on society.”

The U-M community has responded by ushering a new era of faculty public engagement with the launch of the University of Michigan Teach-Out Series. These just-in-time learning experiences have stimulated global conversations on some of the most critical issues facing society such as fake news, the future of the Affordable Care Act, sleep deprivation and more. We hope you will also join us for an examination of the opioid crisis in our next Teach-Out starting Monday, Dec. 4.

Highlights from our office throughout 2017 include the launch of a new community of innovators across higher education with HAILStorm; a re-launch of Problem Roulette, expansion of ECoach, new developments in M-Write, and the addition of Problem Roulette, WILD and Healthy Minds to the Digital Innovation Greenhouse portfolio; the first MOOC co-created by students for students; as well as the first Gameful Learning Summer Institute, the public release of GradeCraft and a new MOOC supporting gameful learning in schools from our Gameful Learning Lab.

Your gift this Giving Blueday will support the Office of Academic Innovation’s work to connect faculty experts from across the university to scale personalized residential learning with digital tools, motivate learners in new ways with gameful pedagogy and expand access to U-M content for lifelong learners around the world through massive open online courses and Teach-Outs. Contributions on this day of giving will also enable multidisciplinary instructional teams of faculty, staff and students to continue to pioneer academic R&D and further Michigan’s reach beyond 6 million global learners.

Gifts may support our top priorities or a specific area of focus:

Engaged Learning – 326407
Gifts will be used to explore innovation in the residential experience to enhance learning for U-M students on campus through new technology-enhanced initiatives fostering broad and enduring participation at U-M.

Lifelong Learning – 326408
Gifts will be used to support new modes of learning, from flipped classrooms to residential MOOCs to interdisciplinary programs, to accelerate lifelong learning and reach diverse communities of learners around the globe.

Personalized Learning & Learning Analytics – 326409
Gifts will be used to support faculty and student research to create customized data driven, learner-centric experiences informed by learning analytics to improve student outcomes.

Teach-Out Series – 329467
Gifts will be used to fund the University of Michigan Teach-Out Series, which provides just-in-time opportunities for learners around the world to come together with our campus community in conversation on a topic of widespread interest.

Gifts this Giving Blueday will continue to enable faculty, staff and students to experiment with digital learning tools and platforms to enrich the residential experience for U-M students and enable new pathways for continued educational growth for more than a half a million Michigan alumni worldwide. Faculty innovators and Academic Innovation’s creative team of developers, behavioral scientists, media specialists, learning experience designers and more will continue to investigate new learning technologies to enhance and evolve the learning landscape while assessing the impact of these innovations along the way.

Your generous gift, no matter the size, will help unlock new opportunities to further faculty public engagement, support personalized, engaged and lifelong learning for the U-M community, and ultimately shape the future of higher education for the 21st century. Give to Academic Innovation.