keynote

Executive Director, Sandbox Collaborative

Dr. Michelle R. Weise is the Executive Director of Sandbox Collaborative, the research and development lab of strategy and innovation at Southern New Hampshire University. Michelle’s work in fostering innovation is an extension of her prior work as the Senior Research Fellow in higher education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. Her book, Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, co-authored with Clayton Christensen, describes the disruptive potential of online competency-based education aligned to workforce needs. Michelle’s commentaries and research have been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Inside HigherEd, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and PBS Newshour. Michelle is also on the Commission on the Future of Higher Education for the American Academy of Arts and Science. She has also served as the Vice President of Academic Affairs for Fidelis Education and taught at Skidmore College and Stanford University. Michelle is a former Fulbright Scholar and graduate of Harvard and Stanford.

Keynote

Hire Education: The Disruptive Potential of Online Competency-Based Education
Dr. Michelle R. Weise will scan the horizon of higher education by focusing on how online technologies, competency-based learning models, modularization, and new business models have the potential to disrupt the growing inequality within our system of higher education. She’ll discuss why a college degree is not the only path to upward mobility for a growing set of nontraditional students who desire on-demand access to critical education for our ever-evolving knowledge economy.