It sounds like an accidental cross between a particle-physics experiment and a pedagogy paper: Academic Innovation Accelerator. But Ohio University’s effort to seek out and test new ideas for teaching appears to be paying off.

The idea for the three-year-old accelerator grew out of a broader university push for transformative ideas, says Bradley A. Cohen, senior vice provost for instructional innovation. As imagined by a group of faculty members and administrators, he says, the accelerator is straightforward: Every fall the university holds a well-publicized “ideation event” to which anyone can bring an idea and discuss it with others who might be interested. “The barrier to entry is very low — 500 words is all we need,” Cohen says, adding that people are also welcome to submit ideas any other time of the year. “We want people to get used to proposing innovative ideas, so we’re not constraining it in any way.”

Next comes a meeting with the person or team behind the idea. “We have a conversation about what’s the next step that we can take that can sharpen this idea, test this idea, help us advance it in some way. The aim is to drive ideas as far as we can as fast as we can until we hit an obstacle that requires something significant, like we have to change a rule at the university or get a million-dollar investment.”

Working with a four-year grant from the university of $924,000, the accelerator makes project managers available to help shepherd ideas, along with some money for expenses like technology improvements or faculty stipends. “Right now we’ve got about 15 projects in play,” says Cohen. “Some of them cost zero dollars to advance. Some of them cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars.” And some may go nowhere, he says, because they’re bad ideas, or good ideas that cost too much, or even just because no one has time to follow up.

The accelerator wants to embrace occasional failure as a cost of innovation, he says.

Ideas aren’t limited to the classroom. Those proposed so far include experimenting with courses taught at and about off-campus sites, encouraging civil discourse on the campus, and exploring whether there’s enough interest in e-sports to add video-game teams to the athletics program.

Kim M. Thompson, a lecturer in environmental and plant biology, is enthusiastic about the idea she proposed: retrofitting a university building with a green roof that would be accessible to students and faculty members for teaching and research. So far, other faculty members have expressed interest, the university’s facilities team has helped her look for a suitable roof, and the accelerator’s project managers have helped her gather information and estimate costs, though the proposal is not far enough along to have had a thumbs-up/thumbs-down decision by campus leaders.

The ideas having the biggest impact so far center on microcredentials, Cohen says — especially an effort in the student-affairs division to offer microcredentials to student employees who acquire specific skills.

Imants Jaunarajs, assistant dean in the Career & Leadership Development Center, says the student-affairs division long wanted to make sure that its student employees got a “robust and useful” experience in their campus jobs but had never had time to put its ideas into practice until the accelerator was announced.

Jaunarajs and his colleagues looked at data on what outside employers seek in new hires, eventually focusing on eight leadership competencies that they thought students needed to develop and be able to talk about in job interviews: intercultural competency, team development, innovation, problem solving, well-being, self-awareness, interpersonal communication, and adaptability.

For each of the competencies, Jaunarajs says, students first absorb information from videos or reading, then answer questions designed to encourage reflection. A test or quiz leads to a beginner-level badge and unlocks the next level of the process, which requires them to go out and put what they’ve learned to use. “We want you to do something different and new, even be a bit uncomfortable, and ultimately to lead in this area,” says Jaunarajs. “Our final step is that you go through a mock interview where we give you really specific information to help you articulate what you have done.”

The student-affairs division has done two rounds of testing and refining so far. Technology problems have delayed a divisionwide, 3,000-student rollout, but Cohen says the project is already having a significant impact at the university. The university’s human-resources office is creating a professional-development microcredentialing program using some of what the student-affairs project pioneered, and the College of Engineering is defining competencies that its instructors think are essential for engineers but that aren’t part of the traditional curriculum.

“It’s getting a lot of attention by the more formal academic side of the house,” Cohen says of the student-affairs project. “There is some conversation about this set of competencies informing our revision of our gen-ed program.”

The student-affairs microcredential effort will probably end up costing around $350,000, says Jaunarajs. “We would not have been able to give time and energy to this type of a project, especially at this level, without the support from the accelerator,” he says. “This was an idea that the division had had for a while, but every day’s so packed with something else.”

Cohen says the accelerator is meant not just to advance individual ideas but also to identify and eliminate barriers to innovation. “All the deans and vice presidents are institutional stakeholders, so when barriers emerge that are institutional structures, we ask them to help. We’re trying to innovate from within and be very intentional about it.”

Even so, the university is not entirely satisfied. “A lot of these ideas are coming from faculty and are interesting but fairly narrow, not institution-changing,” he says. So next spring, the accelerator team may look for ways “to dial up the appetite for some bolder stuff, higher-risk, higher-failing kind of ideas.” The point, says Cohen, is to find projects that really would change the institution, and help it prosper in “a very difficult moment in higher ed in America.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at [email protected].