Charting New Horizons: Continuous Improvement Summit 2026
Analytics, Agility and Impact
Feb. 24-27, 2026
Hosted on Zoom Events
Proposal Submissions (due by midnight on Dec. 12)
- Single registration: $35
- Group registration (3/$75): $75
- Group registration (5/$115): $115
- Group registration (10/$200): $200
- Graduate students: $0
- ERAU faculty/staff: $0
- Presenters: $15
Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University is thrilled to announce the 2026 Continuous Improvement Summit, a four-day virtual experience designed for faculty, staff, and institutional leaders committed to meaningful change. This year’s theme — Charting New Horizons — speaks directly to where we are as a field and where we must go next.
Continuous improvement is no longer a side project. It’s the flight path forward.
We are navigating uncharted skies: demographic shifts, political pressures, workforce demands, technological disruption, and student expectations are converging faster than most institutions can respond. This summit offers a place to chart that response — together.
Just as aviators don’t take flight without a plan, we don’t pursue improvement without direction. This year’s summit challenges you to think beyond traditional models and bureaucratic checklists. Instead, we’ll focus on strategies that drive measurable impact, foster institutional agility, and prioritize student learning, engagement, and success across all parts of the university.
Whether you’re developing a next-generation advising program, reimagining your student leadership model, building faculty capacity or leading data-informed change from your office or classroom — this summit is your space.
To accommodate participants across time zones and to maximize visibility and access to all sessions, the summit will run daily from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Time.
Session Types
We are currently accepting proposals for the following session formats:
- Workshop (2-4 hours): Hands-on, interactive sessions focused on practical tools, frameworks, or strategies participants can immediately apply. Workshops should include structured activities, small group work or problem-solving challenges.
- Case-Based Discussion (1 hour): Moderated conversations based on a 2-3 page fictional case, prompting participants to examine a challenge and co-develop a range of responses.
- Presentation (50 minutes): Dynamic sessions that highlight innovative practices, successful strategies or emerging research in continuous improvement. Presenters should engage the audience and provide actionable takeaways.
Proposals are due by Dec. 12, 2025. Submissions should include a brief abstract, session format and presenter bios.
Thematic Tracks
This year, we are proud to announce several focused tracks to help guide your submissions:
AI in Continuous Improvement: From Curiosity to Capability
Higher education is at a turning point. Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is already transforming how we communicate, teach, advise, and improve. This track will include sessions from the GenAI Community of Practice (co-sponsored with the Assessment Institute), spotlighting how AI can elevate faculty work, enable real-time feedback loops and accelerate change. This is not a conversation about replacing educators. It’s about empowering them and using AI to make better, faster, more human-centered decisions. Whether you’re experimenting with AI tools or developing institutional frameworks, we invite you to help lead the movement.
Breaking Barriers: Connecting Learning Across Campus
This theme explores how institutions are redefining how they understand and improve student learning by bridging academic and student life experiences. By integrating insights across classrooms, co-curricular activities and support services, colleges can build a more complete picture of student development. We invite strategies that use disaggregated data, new methodologies and compelling storytelling to elevate how we capture and act on what matters most: student growth.
Student Affairs and Engagement: Innovation Beyond the Classroom
Student life is a cornerstone of student success and ripe for innovation. This track explores how student affairs professionals are reimagining leadership development, residence life, campus programming and co-curricular learning with a continuous improvement mindset. We welcome sessions that integrate data use, equity and innovative student engagement strategies that show results and inspire action.
Culture Shift: Building a University Where Improvement Thrives
Creating change isn’t just about new systems — it’s about new norms. This track is dedicated to the people, structures and conversations that make continuous improvement part of daily life. How are you fostering cross-campus collaboration, building leadership pipelines or transforming how improvement work is supported and celebrated?
Student Success and the Power of Data
This track focuses on how institutions are using data smartly, ethically and creatively to support student retention, progression and achievement. From institutional research breakthroughs to predictive analytics and real-time performance dashboards, we want to explore how data is being used to inform strategy, not just reporting.
Why This Matters
At Embry‑Riddle, we’ve made a deliberate shift: from compliance to culture, from metrics to meaning, from paperwork to progress. Our mission isn’t to collect data for its own sake — it’s to make the experience better for every student, faculty member and staff colleague who calls our university home.
This summit is our annual checkpoint — a shared space where we pause, learn from one another and plan what’s next. We aren’t here to admire the future. We’re here to build it.
Join us as we chart new horizons in how we lead, learn and improve — together.
National Awards
New in 2026, the Continuous Improvement Summit will award two individual awards and two institutional awards. More information on nominations and applications will be available in the coming months.
Individual Awards
The Pathfinder Award
Recognizing Emerging Leaders Charting New Directions in Continuous Improvement
The Pathfinder Award honors an up-and-coming professional who is forging bold, innovative paths in the pursuit of institutional effectiveness and student success. Like the early navigators of flight, this recipient demonstrates the vision, curiosity and initiative to explore new approaches — challenging convention and inspiring others to reimagine what is possible. Nominees for this award are typically early- to mid-career professionals who are already making a profound impact within their institution or across the broader higher education landscape.
The Aviator’s Honor
Celebrating a Career of Sustained Commitment to Institutional Excellence
Awarded for lifetime or long-term achievement, the Aviator’s Honor recognizes an individual whose enduring contributions have strengthened the foundation of continuous improvement in higher education. This award celebrates not only innovation but consistency — recognizing a professional whose career has elevated the quality, relevance and integrity of educational practices through mentorship, leadership and unwavering dedication to student success.
Institutional Awards
The Polaris Award
Honoring Institutional Innovation That Lights the Way
Named for the North Star, long relied upon for navigation and guidance, the Polaris Award is presented to an institution whose forward-thinking initiative has set a new standard in continuous improvement. Whether through a transformative student success strategy, a novel use of technology or a reimagined approach to academic or operational effectiveness, the recipient institution demonstrates broad impact, clear results and a model that can guide others across the sector.
The Constellation Award
Recognizing Cross-Campus Collaboration and Unified Improvement Culture
The Constellation Award celebrates an institution that has successfully fostered alignment and synergy across traditionally siloed units — academic, student affairs, administrative or otherwise — to advance a shared culture of improvement. Like the stars forming a constellation, this institution’s efforts reflect coordination, clarity and cohesion, demonstrating that true excellence emerges when different parts of a campus community work together with intentionality and purpose.
For highlights of past Inaugural Continuous Improvement Summits, please visit our Summit 2024 page or Summit 2025 page.
Contact Us
Dr. Will Miller
Associate Vice President for Continuous Improvement & Institutional Performance
SACSCOC Liaison
Email: will.miller@erau.edu