Innovation in Education
The job market you'll find in 2030 will look a lot different from the one you'll find today. And if you're already engaged in a career, you know how much it's evolved since you graduated from college. That's why we work hard to build programs not just for where the world is today, but for where it's going to be.
So you're ready for what's next.
Fund for Innovation and Excellence
If you could design the ideal, ready-for-the-future university, it would focus on lifelong learning. It would charge forward with new ideas. It would include partnerships with others, because knowledge needs other perspectives to grow. It would allow people already in the workforce to develop new skills. And it would open doors for all students, no matter their background, to join us.
Through our new President's and Provost's Fund for Program Innovation and Excellence, we asked faculty and staff for their ideas to build that campus. Then we gave them $3 million to launch the best concepts. These are just a handful of the projects we'll pursue:
- Affordable textbooks
- Digital literacy
- Disability studies and community inclusion
- Drone lab
- Game-based learning
- Telemental health counseling services in Michigan
Cool Ideas Start Here
What happens when you invite artists, actors, researchers, musicians and communication professionals to collaborate, sharing the latest technology?
Things you can hardly imagine.
Our Center for Innovation, Collaboration and Engagement supports creative projects with incubation grants. Housed in the College of Arts and Media, the center convenes an intellectually diverse community to bring cutting-edge ideas to life. We provide the tools, like virtual-reality hardware; the filmmakers, musicians and other creators who are part of the center take care of the rest.
Printing the Future
If you're going to create next-gen fashion, you need next-gen tools.
And you'll find them in our full-semester fashion course dedicated to 3D printing and modeling.
Students in the class craft 3D-printed shoes, jewelry and more at our MakerBot Innovation Center. Stocked with 30 3D printers, it's the first MakerBot lab at a public university in the Midwest. The printing process is more than just novel — it can cut weeks off the time it takes to craft items in a more traditional manner.
Fashion students aren't the only ones using the printers. Art students use the printers for sculptures, engineering students have printed prosthetic limbs, and science students have printed 3D fossils. In fact, any student can use the MakerBot lab: We'll even teach you to use the software. No experience required.