Leveraging Excellence Program

An Award Program for Leveraging
the Impact of Effective Practices

Sponsorship for this award program is provided by the Follett Higher Education Group

What is the purpose of this award program?
Throughout our institutions of higher learning, there are outstanding examples of innovation and improvement. Due to our decentralized and independent culture, many of these innovations or improvements lie in pockets where they were first developed. Too few are actively leveraged for maximum impact. Instead, we reinvent.

Through this program, NCCI recognizes initiatives where effective academic and administrative practices have been successfully implemented beyond one department, campus, or institution. We are looking for initiatives that have resulted in significant impact on quality, efficiency, service, or learning.

While other awards exist to recognize excellent improvements or innovations, the specific focus of this award program is dissemination or scaling of those improvements/innovations for leveraged impact.

Examples of Leveraging Effective Practices:

• Development of coordinated curricula/coursework, assessment, or planning methodologies across campuses or institutions.
• Creation of service enhancement models and programs, specifically designed to be used across institutions or throughout higher education.
• Establishment of a series of staff leadership or professional development programs across institutions.
• Broad dissemination of a research finding beyond the original source of study, resulting in benefits to higher education or society.
• Implementation of a system for sharing resources across institutions.
• Implementation of collaborative administrative systems, such as purchasing, IT, libraries, etc. - reducing costs or creating efficiencies across units or institutions
• Collaboration across institutions to develop a compact with the state that results in improved systems, efficiencies, and services.
• Establishing a platform for sharing effective practices across institutions.
• Academic programs using data to improve curricula and share approaches across disciplines
• Successful specialized accreditation practices shared within the discipline

Eligibility:
Academic or administrative improvements extended within or across institutions, systems or organizations of higher education.

Criteria: 
Proposals will be reviewed and evaluated based upon the following criteria.

The practice being leveraged:

1. Is demonstrated to be an effective practice. (It may be a unique practice that addresses an emerging challenge in higher education or an innovative approach to conducting the traditional functions of higher education more effectively and efficiently.)
2. Has been/is being broadly deployed, e.g. having/has had broad impact, implemented by many units/institutions, disseminated widely, achieved increased scale of impact.
3. Has significant and measurable impact.

The award program and opportunities:
Awards will be announced at the NCCI co-sponsored pre-conference at ACE’s Annual Meeting on February 8, 2009, in Washington, DC.  In addition, awardees will present their accomplishments as featured speakers at NCCI’s Annual Conference June 25-27, 2009 in Boston (immediately preceding NACUBO’s annual meeting).

Accomplishments will be featured also on national web sites and in national newsletters and publications.  

“Within higher education, innovation is frequent and creative but it is rarely disseminated or implemented at an appropriate scale.”
David Ward, Former President, ACE