Specifications include, but are not limited to: The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) is seeking proposals to build a transformative academic partnership that would allow UTK to enhance the scale and quality of its digital programs and become a leader in innovating the design and delivery of our technology-enhanced offerings. UTK is seeking collaboration with a comprehensive public research university known for its commitment to innovation, digital learning, and expanding access to higher education. This partnership will assist in expediting UT’s ability to bring high-quality, diverse offerings to new segments of the population. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s strategic vision calls on us to provide the opportunities of a University of Tennessee education to people at every stage of life, wherever and whenever they seek to learn. As a land grant university, we are particularly eager to bring such opportunities to the nearly one million Tennesseans who have some college credit, but no degree, through growth in UTK’s online programs. UTK strives to continually improve and be recognized as an international leader in faculty-driven, quality online education. By working with a partner institution that has extensive experience in digital learning, we intend to make a UTK degree more accessible to Tennesseans wherever they are, support the workforce needs of our state, and create new avenues of access to the lifelong benefits of higher education. We are committed to expanding our digital portfolio while continuing to build upon the high-quality reputation of UTK programs. As UTK builds our capabilities and programs, we seek a partner university to provide us with Operational Advisory Services as well as Innovation and Collaboration Priority Access as outlined below. The partner university should also be willing to participate in a course exchange where the two universities pool their course portfolios, as appropriate within respective faculty governance, regulations, and other approvals. We need our partner to be able to provide resources, experience, and best practices to UTK to accelerate the design, development and implementation of digital learning and innovation projects. Faculty, staff, and administrators from UTK will actively collaborate with faculty, staff, and administrators from our partner institution to develop quality, scalable digital learning programs at UTK. Our partner university should have a relentless pursuit of creativity and design in curriculum, technology, faculty, and partnerships to enable student success and transform society and the communities it serves. In addition, our partner institution should be among the strongest online education brands among large public institutions in the United States to help be a significant market differentiator for UTK in its entry into a highly competitive online market. It is also important to UTK leadership that UTK have priority access to our partner’s successful strategies to innovate and succeed in the digital learning space. An Innovation and Collaboration Priority Access fee is envisioned to guarantee UTK’s prioritization as a primary external academic partner in terms of access and immediacy to a partner’s enterprise-wide innovation, including education and research innovations. Access to our partners innovation-agenda assets will help provide a unique connection between UTK and our potential partner university to help accelerate UTK’s innovation, brand recognition, and reach into its region and beyond. Both institutions should have a mutual goal, through this collaboration, to provide substantially more access to high quality public higher education at an unprecedented scale. Collaboration on innovations in the development and delivery of online education is a significant step to achieve that goal. This includes projects that evaluate key foundational service and technology partners to help build and scale our programs. Our partner university should have extensive experience in online degree and non-degree programs. Based on this experience, UTK seeks to leverage top level access to innovations in process efficiencies, course design and selection strategies, change management approaches to enhance faculty participation and administrative adaptability, insights into revenue optimization, and other academic intellectual property related to accelerating our ramp-up period and sustaining momentum thereafter. Within the guidelines of UTK faculty and university governance, UTK desires access to our partner’s online course catalog, to allow UTK colleges and academic units to utilize this coursework as appropriate within their programs. UTK students studying in a fully online modality will benefit from the immediacy, breadth, and depth of these offerings, where conventionally they would have had to access these courses separately through another institution’s admissions process. Our preference would be for the university partner to also utilize UTK courses taught online to support their programs. Further, UTK and our partner will engage in projects, using our shared institutional experiences of providing a holistic and high-quality learning experience, underpinned by successful student journeys, to result in new academic pathways, including new content, courses, and programs. Each university will share feedback on design, use, and training on content, provide course material content and instructional services, cooperate in support academic program areas necessary to provide these materials and instructional services, seek to leverage course offerings of the other party, and provide students from both institutions the opportunity to access courses which are unavailable at their home institution. This process will help us reach new learners and provide additional educational flexibility, especially for nontraditional college students, and course instruction that helps them reach their goals. As part of this partnership, students will have the ability to seamlessly take online courses from the other partner institution, where their home institution faculty have provided appropriate approvals for this coursework to be included in their respective program. Therefore, this agreement will include mechanisms to both pay our partner institution for instruction provided, as well as receive payments from our partner institution where UTK has provided instruction to our partner’s students.
