September 15, 2026 · Episode 329
How Gies Gives Every Junior a Live Client Project
35 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Gies sources hundreds of live client projects a year so every junior completes one. Inside the staffing, funding, and faculty-first model.
Most institutions measure access at the door. Admit rate, net price, discount rate, yield. The measurement stops at the moment a student enrolls, which means the parts of a degree that actually change outcomes, the live client project, the consulting engagement, the international immersion, get rationed to whoever finds them. Honors cohorts get them. Well-advised students get them. Cohorts of 30 to 40 get them. Everyone else gets the catalog.
At the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, accessibility is defined to include what happens after the door. Serving more learners and lowering the price are the first half of the definition. The second half is whether the experiences inside the degree are reachable by a large share of enrolled students rather than a selected few. That second half is an operational commitment with a staffing model, a project sourcing function, and a sequencing rule about where investment goes first.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. W. Brooke Elliott, Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, who is starting her third year as dean in her twenty-fourth year at the college. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it took on the governance, staffing, and budget side to make that hold.
Quick Overview
- Gies defines accessibility as access to the experiences inside the degree, not just admission and affordability
- Every junior completes a live client project in Business 301, which requires sourcing 300 to 400 real projects a year
- Employers are not charged for undergraduate projects, because the project pipeline functions as the recruiting pipeline
- Corporate partners asking how to recruit are routed to the experiential learning team rather than career services
- Scaling depends on a dedicated experiential learning office paired with internal learning designers, not on individual faculty initiative
- Selective experiences were redesigned rather than defended: international immersions were followed by domestic and then virtual versions
- Faculty investment preceded curricular change on AI by 18 months, and adoption then spread without a mandate
- The shared governance precedent that makes current innovation fast was established a decade ago during the iMBA launch
Accessibility Is a Design Constraint, Not a Recruiting Message
The Gies brand is built on the land-grant mission and expressed as business on purpose. The purpose statement, which Elliott recites routinely to faculty, staff, and students, commits the college to creating access to life-changing and purposeful business education and thought leadership that shapes a better world.
The operational weight sits in how accessibility gets defined internally. Elliott sets the definition from the top and holds teams to it in design decisions rather than in marketing copy. When a team proposes a new experience, the question is not whether it can be delivered well to a select group. The question is whether it has been built in a way that a large number of learners can reach it.
Not every experience can scale to all 900 incoming freshmen, and Elliott does not claim otherwise. What she argues is that intentionality at the design stage frequently produces more reach than teams expect, and that the constraint is usually assumed rather than tested. Students also do not arrive thinking of a business degree as an instrument for shaping a better world. Elliott treats closing that gap as the college’s responsibility, structuring experiences so students contribute to the local community or their home communities during the degree rather than after it.
Scaling a Live Client Project to Every Junior
The undergraduate curriculum runs a four-course spine: Business 101, 201, 301, and 401. Business 301, Business in Action, places every junior on a team working a live client project. Elliott believes it is the largest experiential learning course anywhere, a claim she offers as her own assessment rather than a verified ranking.
The number that makes it real is the sourcing requirement. Gies brings in 300 to 400 projects a year. The range runs from local entrepreneurs to alumni holding executive positions at Fortune 100 companies. The projects are live, which means the failure modes are live as well, and that is much of the point.
Business 401, Crafting Your Purpose, closes the sequence. Having completed a structured client project as juniors, seniors work individually or in teams to identify a place in their local or home community where they can make an impact. Elliott attends the end-of-term presentations and describes the community impact and the students’ investment in it as the clearest evidence that the sequence is doing what it was designed to do.
Alongside the curriculum sits Illinois Business Consulting, now in its thirtieth year. IBC is co-curricular, charges a nominal fee to source projects, and draws students from across the entire campus, including undergraduates, graduate students, and PhD students from Gies and from the Grainger College of Engineering. The cross-disciplinary team composition allows IBC to take on problems of a complexity that a single-college undergraduate team cannot.
The Disruption Lab operates on a similar cross-campus model, pairing Gies and Grainger students on technology problems. A meaningful share of its projects are sourced internally from Gies staff who identify operational challenges in their own units. Students end up improving the efficiency of the college they are enrolled in, which Elliott describes as a full circle that students respond to.
Why the Undergraduate Projects Are Free
Gies does not charge employers for Business 301 projects. The decision looks like forgone revenue until the recruiting math is laid out. Elliott reports that client feedback frequently arrives in the form of surprise: organizations accustomed to compensating MBA students or paying consulting fees find they can get strong work from Gies undergraduates at no cost.
The strategic consequence shows up in how Gies routes inbound employer interest. When a corporate partner asks for the best way to recruit from the college, the answer is not career services. It is the experiential learning team. Contributing a project is the mechanism by which an employer becomes visible to students, and the visibility runs in a direction most workforce-readiness programming misses. Students do not simply hear a company name. They see the actual work.
Elliott used John Deere to illustrate the correction that occurs. Students arrive with tractors in mind. Every John Deere project has a technology focus, and no amount of employer branding closes that perception gap as efficiently as students working the company’s actual problems. The same dynamic applies with Caterpillar. Alumni coaching the student teams are frequently hiring managers, which converts a curricular requirement into an employer pipeline without a separate program to run it.
The Staffing Model That Makes This Repeatable
The failure mode for experiential learning at most institutions is dependence on individual faculty energy. A committed professor builds a client-project course, and the course dies when the professor moves, retires, or burns out. Gies solved for durability on the staffing side before solving for scale.
Business 301 and 401 have had the same faculty lead, Mike Bednar, for roughly a decade, and Elliott credits that continuity directly. Many of the instructors are specialized faculty who came from industry and understand what a client actually expects. The classroom content reflects that origin. Students learn how to scope a project, how to communicate with a client, how to raise a question or flag a problem mid-engagement, and how to respond when the deliverable falls short of what the client anticipated. Elliott calls these power skills, on the grounds that they empower students to be successful, and notes that while some students might develop them naturally, Gies builds them deliberately.
For the rest of the faculty, the college operates a Gies office of experiential learning, fully staffed and dedicated to supporting these opportunities across all programs. A faculty member interested in embedding an experience goes to that team, which evaluates the course and brainstorms approaches. A separate internal teaching and learning team supplies learning designers trained in different pedagogical approaches. The common configuration is a learning designer, an experiential learning staff member, and the faculty member working together, operating from a shared set of foundational principles and a framework that ties the experience back to the learning outcomes stated in the syllabus. Elliott notes that graduate school rarely teaches faculty how to teach, and this capacity-building infrastructure is how Gies compensates for that structurally rather than individually.
Redesigning the Selective Experience Instead of Defending It
The immersion program shows the accessibility rule applied against an experience that was working. Gies designed immersions the way traditional MBA programs do, with 30 to 40 students traveling to an international location to visit companies. It was a strong experience for the students who went.
The problem Elliott put to her team was proportional rather than qualitative. Thirty to forty students were being served in a program enrolling 4,500. Domestic immersions came first, sited close to where learners actually lived. Virtual immersions followed, and the team was openly skeptical that a virtual format could deliver comparable engagement. Running one with a partner institution in Japan, where students learned the culture alongside students in another country, produced strong enough feedback to settle the question.
The precedent matters more than the format. An experience that is excellent for a small cohort is not automatically the right design, and the reach question is worth asking before the quality question is treated as an answer.
Experiential Learning Inside Online Graduate Programs
Gies serves roughly 7,000 graduate students across three credit-bearing programs and about 16 online graduate certificates, and experiential learning is embedded there rather than reserved for residential students. The iMBA curriculum is organized into specializations built as three-course blocks, each closing with a capstone that is itself an experiential opportunity. Students complete at least two, which guarantees curricular experiential learning inside an online degree.
Because iMBA students are full-time working professionals, the program frequently has students bring projects in from their own employers. Elliott has seen those projects lead to promotions for the students who ran them.
The I in iMBA is intentionally undefined. It can stand for Illinois, innovation, or online, and Gies leaves the interpretation to the learner.
Faculty First Is a Sequencing Decision
Elliott states the AI position plainly. Technical skill with AI is table stakes and insufficient on its own. Critical thinking and storytelling are what the experiential learning sequence exists to build, and they are what remains scarce.
The curricular change is specific. Gies previously taught every student basic statistics and a programming language. The modules teaching a programming language are being replaced with modules on using AI to program, on the reasoning that a business student does not need to know Python. That is a core curriculum revision, not an elective addition.
What preceded it is the part most institutions invert. Gies spent 18 months investing in faculty AI capability before expecting curricular change, on the stated logic that investing in faculty first causes the transformation to happen organically. Elliott reports that is what has occurred, particularly heading into this fall. The college runs an AI email address where faculty submit what they are doing in the classroom, and the submissions show faculty building AI into the undergraduate core, the majors, and the graduate curriculum without a central mandate driving it.
Top-down movement runs in parallel. Gies launched the MSBAi, a Master of Science in Business Analytics with a lowercase i for AI, welcoming a first cohort of 30 students in a deliberately small and curated launch. The program is built around applications of AI across business disciplines. Elliott treats the combination of organic faculty adoption and intentional program launch as the effective approach, rather than choosing between them. Institutions still working to close their own AI readiness gap tend to reverse the order, purchasing tools and announcing curriculum before faculty have the capability to carry it.
The Governance Precedent That Made This Fast
The reason faculty buy-in is not currently the bottleneck at Gies is that it was solved a decade earlier under harder conditions.
When Gies launched the iMBA before the pandemic, the online market was not crowded, and the college entered it with a high-quality MBA under $30,000, fully flexible. Most online programs at the time launched by hiring adjuncts and leaving core tenured faculty out. Gies took the opposite approach and spent significant time bringing core tenured faculty in. Elliott, then a faculty member rather than an administrator, was in those conversations, which centered on compensation, on what support would be provided, and on what it means to deliver to a course of 300 when the norm is a section of 30.
She credits the two deans who preceded her, Larry DeBrock and Jeff Brown, with insisting that faculty hold a substantive role and that the faculty governance process actually play out. The result is that the college’s best faculty develop and deliver the content in the program, which Elliott considers a differentiator she does not see matched in other online graduate programs.
A decade forward, the expectation is set institutionally. When Elliott brings the next innovation to faculty and asks them to lean in, the response is not resistance. It is a request for resources, for a community of practice, for a path to the skill set. The work is no longer persuasion. It is provisioning. Elliott is candid that this culture is not typical, and that the trust underwriting it accumulated across 24 years and a consistent college-first decision rule.
McNaughton’s framing is that leadership without trust is not leadership, and that the absence of the push-pull dynamic common in shared governance reflects leadership on the faculty side as much as the dean’s side.
Disruption as an Access Mechanism
Elliott treats periods of disruption as the moments when access expands. The pandemic was damaging and simultaneously created the opening to expand access to education in ways the college had not thought possible. She reads the AI moment the same way. The uncertainty and fear are real, and the opportunity is real, and the second does not arrive unless someone goes after it.
The forward agenda follows from the same logic: grow the undergraduate program with excellence rather than volume alone, continue widening the reach of each experience, and extend a brand that remains largely Midwestern into national recognition. Elliott is explicit that Gies is not the right fit for every student, and equally explicit that the students for whom it is the right fit should be able to find it coast to coast.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
- Mission and purpose alignment has to function as a decision rule. A purpose statement earns its place only when resource allocation and program design trace back to it. Elliott notes she speaks with every staff member perhaps once a year, yet the North Star is clear enough across the college that decisions made without her still align. That is the test of whether a purpose statement is operative or decorative.
- Learner-centric requires faculty first, and the order is not rhetorical. Elliott’s formulation deliberately unsettles people. Faculty deliver the experience, so the path to a better learner experience runs through faculty capability and support. Gies applied the sequence to the iMBA launch a decade ago and to AI over the last 18 months, investing in faculty before expecting delivery in both cases.
- Lead authentically, because that is what mobilizes people beyond what an org chart can compel. Elliott’s position is that leadership styles vary widely and authenticity is what causes people to rally and move mountains that did not look movable. McNaughton added a fourth: treat disruption as an opportunity for growth and change rather than a condition to be survived.
The lessons are not confined to business education. Elliott points to a growing body of work across disciplines on learning by doing as the preparation that holds up in an AI-saturated labor market. Delivering an unmatched learner experience, and making that experience accessible once students walk through the door, is not a business school problem. It is an academic design problem that every college on a campus can take up.
About Our Guest
As Dean of Gies College of Business, Brooke Elliott leads the College in developing a compelling, strategic vision while continuing to build upon its distinctive brand and identity. This includes assessing and expanding Gies Business’ portfolio of on-campus and online programs to strengthen its position as an innovative leader among the nation’s best business schools. Brooke previously served as Executive Associate Dean of Academic Programs and EY Professor in Gies Business where she was responsible for providing strategic oversight of the Gies portfolio of academic degree and non-degree programs. Brooke also served as Associate Dean of Online where she was responsible for the development and execution of Gies’ strategy in online education and Head of the Department of Accountancy in Gies, leading one of the most innovative and high ranked accounting departments in the world. Brooke holds a BS in accounting and MBA from Indiana as well as PhD from Washington.
Connect with Dr. W. Brooke Elliott on LinkedIn→
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 329 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. W. Brooke Elliott
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
[00:00:31] Meet Dr Brooke Elliott
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Dr. Brooke Elliott, Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. Brooke has been at Gies for twenty-four years, starting out as assistant professor, and now she’s the dean. Normally, I’d be a little concerned about this being that she’s only got experience at one school.
However, Brooke is a very unique individual. She’s been in the job twenty-four years, and she’s developed a compelling strategic vision while continuing to build upon Gies’ distinctive brand and identity. In short, she’s wise beyond her years. What I really like is the way that Gies is going about and making higher ed accessible and valuable to students, including its experiential components, which I’ve not seen the extent of this at other higher ed schools as yet.
For those of you who might say this is about a business education, not other disciplines, I would challenge you and say that the lessons and takeaways in this episode are applicable to many other colleges and schools within higher ed. So let’s get started with a great interview.
Brooke welcome to the program.
Brooke Elliot: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Drumm McNaughton: I’m glad to have you here as well. I am looking forward to a great conversation with you.
[00:01:49] Brooke’s Path to Dean
Drumm McNaughton: Now, you’re the dean of the Gies College of Business. Tell us more about yourself and about Gies, please.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, so I’m starting year three as dean in the Gies College of Business, but this is my 24th year here on campus at the University of Illinois. So I started my academic career in Gies and the land-grant mission really resonated with me, and the longer I stayed at Illinois, the more I loved Illinois.
And so I decided to really just commit myself, from a professional perspective to this college. And I’m really grateful to be in the dean position now. I’ve grown up in the college. I understand us deeply, and then I think, you know, I’m well-positioned to lead us forward in a way that very few individuals could.
I’m from Southern Indiana, so if you hear the accent, that’s where it comes from. People don’t always guess Southern Indiana, but it is. I went to Indiana University, my undergrad and MBA are from Indiana, and my PhD is from the University of Washington, so I’m a three-time Big Ten alum. So I love the Big Ten, love the Midwest. I’m Midwest through and through.
Drumm McNaughton: Do you get any of that NIL money?
Brooke Elliot: Oh no, I wish. You think Dean should be able to like cash in on that.
Drumm McNaughton: Oh, well, I w- I certainly would think so. You’re educating these athletes, so why shouldn’t you be entitled to it?
Brooke Elliot: I, I, I agree. I agree. And I think I’d be pretty successful in the NIL landscape as deans go, so I’m gonna pose that to the chancellor.
Drumm McNaughton: I think that’s a great idea. Now, make, make sure that you’ve got your tenure all set and everything else, ’cause if the CFO gets wind of it, you’re in trouble.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, I probably would be. Yeah, I don’t think Amy Heater would be too thrilled with that idea, so.
Drumm McNaughton: So, no.
[00:03:29] Land Grant Purpose
Drumm McNaughton: But, you know, all seriousness aside, Gies is special because it, you guys have embraced your land-grant mission. But you’ve got other things going on that you’re looking to do as well, the access to education aligning with your mission statement. Tell me a little bit about that, please.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, positively. You know, we really deeply believe in our land-grant mission, and we’ve aligned everything from a brand perspective around that land-grant mission. And so our brand is business on purpose. We have a set of commitments and beliefs. We have a very strong purpose statement, creating access to life-changing and purposeful business education and thought leadership that shapes a better world.
And, you know, whenever we talk about that purpose statement, we really do try to live it out. And it’s expanding access to education, and when I talk about expanding access, I don’t just mean the number of learners that we serve, but how affordable is that education and how accessible are the experiences whenever you get here.
It’s not enough to just get here and walk through the door, but what is your experience when you walk through that door? And we wanna make those experiences accessible to all. And that’s what we deeply believe here in Gies in both undergraduate education and in graduate education as well. From a, you know, what makes us distinct, we really lean into action or experiential learning.
We have something called Illinois Business Consulting. We just celebrated 30 years, and we were really at the forefront of experiential learning, and now it’s embedded throughout every one of our programs. And so when I think about what really sets us apart, it’s that mix of the land-grant mission, our commitment to accessibility to every experience that we offer and then our focus on learning by doing, which is becoming more and more important.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:05:18] Shaping a Better World
Drumm McNaughton: And I think all of those are incredibly important, especially when we start talking about the current issues in higher ed, the trust in higher education institutions, the degrees, the cost of the degrees, the value that people are getting them.
You’ve got a specific purpose, though, and all of what you do feeds into that. When we spoke a couple of weeks ago, you said you’re here to shape a better world. That resonated with me.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, a lot of times individuals don’t think about a business school really purposefully and intentionally talking about shaping a better world, but we talk about that all the time. I’m always reciting our purpose statement, whether talking to faculty and staff or students.
And, you know, for us, I think faculty and staff, it does resonate, and I believe that we attract a lot of top talent, both on the faculty and staff side because our purpose statement really resonates with them from a personal values perspective. From a student perspective, though, it really is, you know, we have about 900 freshmen that just showed up this week on campus, and they don’t necessarily think about that they chose business school so that they can go out and shape a better world.
And so it’s our responsibility to really help them see how they can pursue as business education, they can build that skill set, that knowledge, those capabilities, and they can take them to not shape a better world later, but to shape a better world now. Many of our experiential learning opportunities are structured so that they can contribute to the local community, so that they can contribute back to their home communities.
We want them to see the power that education has and how it impacts them individually, but then how they can use that to do good and go out and really shape a better world. And it’s cool to see the transformation from freshmen to seniors and they really understand that whenever they leave, and I think it makes us distinct in terms of what business education can be.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Now I’m gonna have to call you on something because you just used the word “cool”, and I mean, that your generation doesn’t use those kind of words. That’s my generation.
Brooke Elliot: I don’t, well, yeah, I don’t know. I’m, you know, I’m a ’70s kid, so.
Drumm McNaughton: Uh, no you’re not.
Brooke Elliot: I was born in the ’70s.
Drumm McNaughton: Okay, that’s a little better.
[00:07:45] Designing Access for All
Drumm McNaughton: One of the key things with this is creating the value, but you’ve also gotta make it more accessible.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: And if you’re looking for the higher purpose, shaping a better world, and that really is the true purpose of education and especially business, because business drives much of the world. But to do that, you’ve gotta make it more accessible. So what are you guys doing that’s making this more accessible?
Brooke Elliot: Yeah. So part of it is just really talking about what accessibility means. And a lot of it is, you know, it’s from the top down. So I’m setting the tone, I’m really setting the culture. Anytime I have an opportunity to talk about accessibility, I ensure that I’m clear that it’s accessibility to education, which means we’re serving more, it’s more affordable, but that’s not enough. It’s accessibility to experiences.
And so my teams, they understand that that is what we’re trying to do. So every decision that our teams make, I ask them to think about, “if you’re creating a new experience, don’t just think about how to provide the experience to a select few, but are we creating an experience in a way that it’s accessible to a large number of our learners?”
It’s not that every experience is gonna be accessible to all, you know, 900 freshmen, but you really have to approach it in an intentional way. And I think what we found is, sometimes it’s easier than you think. If you just take that mindset and approach it with intentionality. In the graduate space as an example, we have immersions, and we designed immersions just like traditional MBA programs, where 30 to 40 students come together, they travel to an international location, we expose them to different companies. And then though what I ask our team to think about, well, you know, we’re serving 30 to 40 students whenever we have 4,500 students in our iMBA program. How can we make that more accessible? So we started doing domestic immersions, and domestic immersions close to where our learners were. And then we started doing virtual immersions, which, you know, my team was a little skeptical upfront as to whether it could actually be as engaging, but we got such positive feedback.
We brought in individuals from Japan, where we have a partner institution, and they learned about the culture, and they learned virtually with other students from a different country. And so it really is, if you have that intentionality behind it, whenever you’re designing these experiences, you can do something that’s really pretty transformational.
[00:10:25] Business in Action Projects
Drumm McNaughton: Are these immersion experiences, the experiential learning, are they throughout the curriculum? Do you have a specific course? All the above?
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, all the above. So, every single program in the Gies College of Business has an experiential learning opportunity or experience. And one that I’m most proud of is in our undergraduate curriculum, we have a course, Business 301, it’s part of a series of courses that our students take, so 101, 201, 301, 401, throughout their four undergraduate years here with us. But in 301, it’s called Business in Action, and every single junior student works as part of a team on a live client project. To my knowledge, it’s the largest experiential learning course that exists anywhere. We source 300 to 400 projects a year, and the projects range from either something in the local community where perhaps a team is working with a local entrepreneur. Too, we have alums that are in executive positions in Fortune 100 companies.
And so the projects are real, they’re live projects, and it is a transformational experience for our students. And it also means that oftentimes it’s a transformational experience for our alums because they get to engage with our students in a way that they never thought possible. And it creates also great outcomes because a lot of times those individuals that are coaching the student teams through the project also are employers, and so they see the talent that we have, and they’re excited to come to campus and help us create great outcomes for our students.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. It also, as a byproduct and a good byproduct, it exposes students to employers, but it also exposes the employers to the students, and it’s a potential pipeline for jobs.
Brooke Elliot: 100%. Yeah, so that’s, it’s a great call-out, and, you know, whenever I talk to a new corporate partner and they’re like, “Hey, we would love to recruit from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, like, what’s the best way? Do you, you know, should I connect with someone in career services?”
I’m like, “Actually, you should connect with someone on our experiential learning team,” because the best way to get ingrained in the college and for students to see who you are is to contribute a project. Because it’s not just, they don’t just hear the name Caterpillar, right? They see the type of work that Caterpillar does.
And then the students get excited. You know, maybe changes sometimes, you know, preconceived notions or misconceptions that students might have about a company. Like John Deere, you know, a lot of students still think about tractors, but they’re honestly, like, they are a technology company. And it’s hard to convince students of that until they see the projects, and then they’re like, “Well, every John Deere project has a technology focus.”
And we’re like, “Yeah, because it’s a technology company.” So it really does… It, it’s a great way to get corporate employers engaged and really to provide those employers a pipeline to what I believe is some of the most outstanding talent anywhere in the world.
Drumm McNaughton: Do you charge employers for these projects?
Brooke Elliot: We don’t. And so we do– So we don’t in that Business 301, so at the undergraduate level, no. Like we, we don’t charge at all, and many of them, the feedback that they provide on the back end is, “Oh my gosh, we’re either compensating MBA students or paying high dollar consulting fees, and we realize that we can get outstanding work at no cost from the Gies College of Business.”
[00:13:47] Co Curricular Innovation Labs
Brooke Elliot: We do have a program which I referenced earlier, Illinois Business Consulting, and we charge a nominal fee to source projects. Those teams are formed a little bit differently in that the program is housed in the Gies College of Business, but they are students from all across campus, undergraduates, graduates, PhDs from the Gies College of Business, Grainger College of Engineering. Every college across this campus is represented in that program. So it’s just a different type of talent and they can actually develop a solution to a much more complex and higher level problem.
Drumm McNaughton: So that’s the co-curricular opportunities we talked about before.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, for sure, and that’s not the only… So IBC would be one co-curricular opportunity, but we actually have a, a lot of different co-curricular opportunities.
Another one is called the Disruption Lab. The Disruption Lab is something, again, that’s housed in the Gies College of Business. It brings together Gies College of Business students and Grainger students, and they are working on technology problems. And many of those projects are actually sourced internally from Gies. And so our teams, our staff, will identify challenges that they’re facing. We will provide those projects to the Disruption Lab, and then our own students and Grainger students are working to help the college become more efficient, more effective. So it’s a really cool full circle whenever your students are helping you to really innovate and lead. And they see that, and they love contributing back to their home college
Drumm McNaughton: That is kind of neat because I hadn’t thought about it if they’re contributing. I’ve run projects like this before when I was a faculty member, and I think we had talked about Cal State San Marcos has this—
Brooke Elliot: Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: —particular program. It’s a three credit hour required course where seniors will go out and consult to companies in their local area. Yours is only the second institution I’ve heard.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you mentioned that, and so, you know, we talked about Business 301, but then we have the senior level course, Business 401. It’s called Crafting Your Purpose, and much like the experience that you described, now that the students have had a structured opportunity to work on a project, we ask them either as individuals or as a team to go out into the local community or their home communities and identify a place where they can make an impact and shape a better world.
And it’s a transformative experience for the students, and I love… I oftentimes will go at the end and see the, the presentations, and, you know, they just have such an impact in their home communities, and you can see how much it means to the students that they’re able to give back in that way. And then we talk about the importance of giving back to your community, giving back to your organization, and of course, someday giving back to your alma mater.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. We know how important it is for the students. It helps them identify their interests, what they really wanna do, quote, “When they grow up.” Their passions, et cetera. They’re learning by doing.
[00:16:34] Faculty Skills and Support
Drumm McNaughton: What about the faculty, though? I would think, one, this is really exciting for faculty, but also two, it requires special training for them so that they can oversee these projects and even change the way they’re teaching in the classroom.
Brooke Elliot: No, that’s right. Yeah, I mean, these set of courses have been in place for about a decade, and we have had an outstanding faculty lead, Mike Bednar, that the entire time. And so, one, I feel very grateful that we’ve had such consistent leadership. And what he’s done over time is built an amazing team. A lot of the instructors are specialized faculty members who come from industry, and so they have that experience, they understand from the client side what the client is looking for. And so a lot of the classroom experience is how do you scope a project? How do you communicate with a client? How do you communicate whenever you have a question or there’s a challenge with a project? What if you don’t deliver what the client expected? Like, how do you respond to that?
And so it does require a really special skill set from the faculty side. But it also is ensuring that our students are developing those skills. And a lot of times I refer to them as power skills because it does… Like, it empowers them to go out and be successful. Maybe they would develop naturally, but we’re very intentional about it. And then our students can tell outstanding stories about the skills that they’ve developed.
Back to your point, though, like, I do think it’s the faculty that teach in 301 love teaching in that course. The faculty that teach in 401 love teaching in the course. It requires you to be a little more agile but it really, I think, is rewarding in the end for both the faculty and the students.
Drumm McNaughton: But these aren’t the only experiential learning experiences that student get going through the curriculum. How do you train the other faculty outside of 301 and 401 to be able to bring those things in? I mean, when I went through graduate school, we were never taught how to teach. It was something that we had to learn from our mentors or whatever.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, for sure. So we have a jelly office of experiential learning. And so we have a full staff that is dedicated to supporting experiential learning opportunities across the college. And so if you’re a faculty member and you’re interested in building an experiential learning experience into your course, you go to that team and they will come in and evaluate, you know, your course and brainstorm with you different ways that you might build in that experience.
So that resource has really been invaluable for us. And what I see is our faculty in the graduate, in our graduate programs, in the undergraduate programs, like they trust that team. We also have a large internal teaching and learning team. So we have learning designers who, you know, are trained in different pedagogical approaches.
And oftentimes it will be the staff from the experiential learning office then partnering with someone from the teaching and learning team and the faculty member. And so you can imagine a learning designer, someone who has experience and expertise in developing experiential learning experiences and the faculty member, and it becomes a very powerful team.
We do believe it’s important, you know, to do it intentionally, and there are positively foundational principles and a framework that, that we follow to ensure, you know, that the faculty member and the students are obtaining the learning outcome that’s set out in the syllabus, right?
From the very beginning. So we’ve figured out how to staff it, it’s fairly unique, which is good for us because I think it helps us stand out.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:20:06] Online iMBA Experiential Model
Drumm McNaughton: And the other thing too, just to clarify, this is both for face-to-face, on the ground, and for online.
Brooke Elliot: Yes, 100%. So we serve about 7,000 total graduate students across a portfolio of three different credit-bearing programs, and then about 16 online graduate certificates. And those programs as well have embedded experiential learning ex- opportunities. And so I mentioned some of the co-curricular opportunities are immersions, but for example, in our iMBA program, our courses are structured in specializations, so three course blocks, and at the end of each three-course block, there’s a capstone, which is an experiential learning ex- opportunity.
And so they have to choose at least two of those throughout the program, and so they’re guaranteed to have at least two curricular experiential learning opportunities. And it’s really an ability to apply what they’ve learned across that specialization and then match it on the other side with, you know, a real problem.
Sometimes in the iMBA program what we do is we actually have the students bring in projects from their employers, right? Because they’re all full-time professionals. And then it can really have a significant impact, and we’ve seen how these projects can then lead to a promotion for one of our students, which is rewarding to see.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. And just to clarify, IMBA is International MBA, correct?
Brooke Elliot: Oh, oh, no. So the I means a lot of different things. So, the MBA is, it’s the same degree we used to offer residentially. We now only offer it online. The I, it can mean Illinois, it can mean innovation, it can mean online, and so it doesn’t have a specific reference.
We really let it, we really leave it to the learner to decide how they define the I.
Drumm McNaughton: Very well. There is another innovation, another I word for you.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yep.
[00:21:57] AI in the Curriculum
Drumm McNaughton: I am real curious, what are you doing to interject your curriculum with AI? Because that is, you know, one of the huge things right now.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah. We are taking all types of different approaches. , You know, business education, like many industries, is being disrupted by AI, and we have to ensure, like it is table stakes that our students have that technical skill set. It is not sufficient in any way. They have to develop critical thinking, storytelling, right?
All of those fundamental skills that we just talked about, they develop through our experiential learning opportunities. In terms of ensuring that students have those technical skill sets, we’re taking a couple of different approaches. At the undergraduate level, we are revising a few of our undergraduate core courses, which, you know, if you go back a few years, we taught every single student, you know, basic statistics, and then we taught them a programming language.
Now we’re replacing those modules that focus on developing a programming language to how to use AI to program, because you actually, you don’t have to know Python, not if you are just a business student, right? And so, we’re changing those, really, those core courses. And the great thing about Gies is we really have a culture for innovation, and so, our faculty are, one, we’ve invested over the last 18 months in ensuring our faculty have the skill set.
So we chose to invest in faculty first, because if you invest in faculty first, then the transformation will happen organically, and that’s what exactly we see happening, particularly coming into this fall. And so, we have an AI email address where faculty can submit what they’re doing in the classroom related to AI.
And what we see is throughout both the undergraduate core in through the undergraduate majors and into the graduate curriculum, faculty are starting to, like, organically build in AI. We’re also being very intentional in the graduate space. We just launched and we welcomed our first cohort on Monday to the MSBAi, and so little i, and so Masters of Science in Business Analytics or AI.
And so again, very, very innovative, but we just welcomed 30 students to that brand-new program. It’s the first year, so we’re starting with a, a very small and curated cohort, but that program will be solely focused on developing really applications of AI in different business disciplines.
And so you can think about it happening from, like, bottom up and also top down. And I believe that’s a very effective approach to ensuring that all of our students have the skill set that they need to be successful.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s kinda neat to hear you talk about this thing. That– Now there’s my, my language coming through.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yep.
Drumm McNaughton: So it’s neat hearing you talk about these things, especially faculty first. That’s critically important.
[00:24:48] Faculty Buy In and Governance
Drumm McNaughton: Talk to me about the shared governance aspects around this, because getting faculty buy-in to do this, I don’t care how great an idea it is, you’ve gotta have the faculty on board.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah. 100%. You know, if you roll back a decade, whenever we launched the IMBA program, which at that time it was pre-pandemic, online programs weren’t that prevalent. It wasn’t a very crowded market, and we decided to move into the market with a low-cost MBA, so high quality, under $30,000, fully flexible.
And we really did disrupt graduate business education. The way we were able to do that, though, is it really was a, a faculty first approach which a lot of online programs at that time didn’t take that approach. A lot of different online programs, they were launching by hiring adjuncts, and they weren’t including their core tenured faculty.
But we spent a lot of time getting our core tenured faculty on board. And one of the reasons I think that program has been so successful and continues to be is it is our very best faculty that develop the content and deliver in that program. And it really stands out. I don’t know of another online graduate program that commits the faculty resources that we do.
So that was really the first time that we realized from an innovation perspective, for this to work well, we have to have faculty buy-in. And I was involved in… At that point I wasn’t an administrator, I was a faculty member, and so I remember those conversations about compensation and how we’re gonna be supported, and if we deliver to a course of 300, like, what does that mean?
We’re used to delivering to sections of 30 students. And so, you know, I give a lot of credit to the two deans that preceded me, Larry Debrock and then Jeff Brown, because they were very intentional about ensuring that, you know, faculty had a significant role and that faculty governance role played out.
And what has happened now, if you roll forward a decade, is whenever we approach any new innovation, everyone expects us to lead in that way. And so, you know, whenever I talk to faculty, like, “This is our next new innovation and we’re going to invest in you, and I need you to lean in,” I mean, it’s, it really is, it’s not near as difficult.
Like, for the most part they’re like, “Yes, that’s great. Where are the resources? Can we create a community of practice? How can I ensure that I have the skill set?” So it’s really not trying to convince faculty that they need to do it, it’s just ensuring that faculty have the resources to move forward.
So I’m so appreciative. Our culture is very different here than I think at a lot of different institutions.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. I would say you’re absolutely right on that. You don’t seem to have that push/pull that many institutions have with the shared governance. I also would credit the leadership as well, is there’s got to be great leadership, not only from, you know, your position, the former deans as well, but also from a faculty perspective to where they’re able to partner and see with you and your companions.
What’s next?
Brooke Elliot: That’s right.
[00:27:54] Leadership Trust and Culture
Brooke Elliot: You know, it requires a tremendous amount of trust. And, you know, I think in my position, because I’ve been at this institution, because this is the start of my 24th year, I do have that trust. And, you know, I think it’s one of the reasons that I was chosen to be in this role.
But when you have that trust and when you’ve built it over such a long period, it is easier to get buy-in. Because the faculty here know, and I think they knew this about the prior dean too, but I always have the college’s best interest in mind. I care deeply about the institution. I care deeply about the college.
And just implicitly, you know, that’s how I make decisions. It’s not about what benefits me professionally. It’s about what benefits the college and how can I ensure that I’m positioning the college to continue to grow from a reputation perspective, from, you know, a rankings perspective. And so they know I always have a college first mindset and that will buy you a lot if you have that trust.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, you cannot be an effective leader without the trust, period.
Brooke Elliot: No, 100%, 100%
Drumm McNaughton: End of story.
Well, Brooke, this has been a fabulous conversation. I wanna just interject one thing for listeners is we’ve been talking about the Gies School of Business, but all of these lessons that you’ve taught us, you’ve shared with us, Brooke, it’s applicable to any college or school within a university, the way you go about these things, the way you create value for your students and your school.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah. Yeah, 100%. It’s interesting because there, I’ve been, I mean, I read incessantly, right? It’s a habit you develop whenever you’re a PhD student, I think. And I’ve been reading more and more, not just within business education, but across education. More people are talking about experiential learning and how learning by doing is really the way to ensure that in the age of AI, that students across all colleges, all disciplines, have the broad skill set that they need to be successful.
And so, you know, that’s applicable broadly. When you think about, I talk about delivering an unmatched learner experience, right? It doesn’t matter what college you’re in, it’s creating that value whenever the students walk through the door and ensure that experiences are accessible. It’s not just about business education, right?
It’s about any education. And, you know, I think what, at least for me, I think is applicable most broadly is just, you know, ensuring that you have a clear North Star. Like we have a purpose statement that we believe in, that we develop together, and it, you know, it’s not just something on paper, it’s not a marketing slogan.
Like, we believe it. And my faculty believe it, and our staff believe it. And whenever you have that and you make decisions based on that purpose statement, like, really amazing things can happen, because you’re rowing in the same direction. Even if, like, I’m don’t have an opportunity, of course, to talk with, you know, all my staff. I mean, maybe once a year I get to talk to every single staff member, but they know what our North Star is, and so that’s how we make decisions, that’s how we invest resources. And when you do that, just it’s, go back to my it’s pretty cool.
Drumm McNaughton: It is pretty cool.
[00:30:58] Key Takeaways for Leaders
Drumm McNaughton: So I think you’ve just taken us to our three takeaways for presidents and boards. Mission and purpose aligned, I think is what you were just talking about.
Brooke Elliot: 100%.
Drumm McNaughton: And the other two would be?
Brooke Elliot: Yeah. So I would think mission and purpose aligned, learner centric. I always say learner centric, but faculty first, and sometimes that throws people. But I think to be learner centric, you have to put faculty first, because the faculty deliver the experience. And so, you know, I always focus really on those pieces.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s the Southwest mantra. Take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers, and that will take care of your share price.
Brooke Elliot: Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a great call-out. That’s right. That’s exactly right.
Drumm McNaughton: So… next.
Brooke Elliot: Oh, next I’m supposed to do…
Drumm McNaughton: Oh, three of them. Three of them.
Brooke Elliot: Oh, three of them. Yes, mission and purpose first, you know, learner-centric, but faculty first, second. You know, third, third I really think it comes down to leading authentically. That’s, you know, that’s a lesson that I share broadly.
You know, no matter what type of leader you are, and there are all types of different leaders, you know, what I have found is if you lead authentically, you can… People will rally around you and people will move mountains, right, when you didn’t think they were movable. And so that’s, I think that’s the last piece that I find, you know, to be compelling.
Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, those are three great takeaways. Thank you.
[00:32:35] Disruption as Opportunity
Drumm McNaughton: I’m gonna throw in one more, is disruption. Disruption is an opportunity for growth and change.
Brooke Elliot: Oh, always. Yeah. I, see, may- maybe that should have been my third. If you would’ve asked me for four, that’s, I think that’s where…
Drumm McNaughton: We can, we can do four.
Brooke Elliot: We can do four. I mean, that’s what we live by here in the Gies College of Business. You know, any time there’s significant disruption, it does cause a lot of uncertainty.
It causes a lot of fear. But I’m always excited in a time of disruption because it creates tremendous opportunity. I mean, when I think… You know, I can provide concrete examples, like the pandemic was terrible, right? It was a significant disruption, but it gave us an opportunity to expand access to education in a way we never thought possible.
And so every time, you know, with AI now, we, people are scared. There’s uncertainty, but it creates tremendous opportunity. You just have to be willing to go get it. And we definitely are here in the Gies College of Business.
Drumm McNaughton: Exactly.
[00:33:29] What’s Next for Gies
Drumm McNaughton: And speaking of that, what’s next for you? What’s next for Gies?
Brooke Elliot: Oh, all kinds. Well, we’re gonna keep serving more students, making, you know, Gies education more accessible. I’m really committed to growing our undergraduate program. And again, coming back to it’s not just having more learners, but it’s growing it with excellence and continuing to grow the experiences that we offer so that they’re more and more accessible.
We want to continue to expand our brand. You know, Illinois still is kind of a Midwest brand, and Gies, I want to be known coast to coast. And I think, like, that, that’s where we deserve to be. A-and so I’m really focused on, you know, ensuring that people know our story, that coast to coast people know Gies and they know why Gies.
And Gies might not be the best fit for everyone, but there are some outstanding individuals out there who I know, you know, if they spent time with us, their lives would be transformed, and they’ll go out and shape a better world, which is what we’re all about.
Drumm McNaughton: Very good.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, Brooke, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for being on the program.
Brooke Elliot: Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.
Drumm McNaughton: Likewise. Take care and feel free to reach out if we can do anything to help you.
Brooke Elliot: Okay. Will do. Thank you.
Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for tuning in, and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Brooke Elliott. Brooke, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to the next time our paths cross. To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. I look forward to our next episode.
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