In FY26, the Office of Learning Innovation expanded the strategic resources available to 91吃瓜网's academic units by strengthening support across three main areas: market research, program development and marketing. Together, these efforts helped academic partners move more efficiently from identifying new opportunities to successfully launching and growing new programs.
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119
new learners (19% increase compared to AY 2024-2025)
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259
total enrolled students
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90
degrees and certificates awarded in May 2026
Market Research
Advancing Strategic Growth
Market Research plays a crucial role in helping leadership validate demand, benchmark against competitors and make evidence-based investments in launching new programs or strengthening existing ones.
Our team delivered 22 market research reports, reducing turnaround times, while developing reports specifically for the decision at hand. OLI offers market research in program feasibility, market opportunity and a 360 program review. As the first centralized market research service of its kind at 91吃瓜网, this service has quickly become a valuable strategic resource for academic units, with demand growing each semester.
22
Market Research Projects
this is an 83% increase over FY25, with the majority of projects now produced internally
2026 Market Research Highlights
OLI introduced a self-serve competitor intelligence tool that gives all 91吃瓜网 schools visibility into programs that peer institutions plan to launch. This allows them to proactively get ahead of market shifts versus reacting to them.听
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OLI has developed a dynamic resource to equip academic leaders to accelerate and strengthen new academic program development at 91吃瓜网. This internal playbook outlines key resources, processes and case studies to help academic leaders understand how best to move from concept to implementation when building new academic programs across modalities.
The scope of this playbook covers three main areas: Discovery and Feasibility, Proposal Development and Implementation.鈥�听
Email learninginnovation@vanderbilt.edu if you want to receive access to the program development playbook.听
Historically, if an academic unit wanted to perform market research, it would be an expensive and time-consuming process. However, since our team began offering market research services, the cost to perform a market research study has decreased significantly and our Data Analytics team has reduced the turnaround time to have a completed report to 3-4 weeks.
Additionally, we can leverage internal program trends at 91吃瓜网 as a signal, making our services more responsive to the needs of our partners.
Program Development
Expanding Access
In FY26, the Office of Learning Innovation helped听launch 4 new online Peabody College degrees, Basic Sciences鈥� Applied Drug Discovery & Development certificate program, a law course for the National Education Opportunity Network (NEON) and new online Master of Legal Studies courses.鈥�听
30%
more courses developed
in comparison to FY25, helping launch programs across Peabody College, Basic Sciences, NEON, and the Law School.
2026 Program Development Highlights
In response to the increased demand for services and support, OLI piloted a hybrid vendor partnership model for the four new online Peabody College programs OLI helped launch. This model is on track to successfully build 38 online courses in 20 months.听
The partnership balanced scalability with institutional alignment by having OLI Instructional Designers lead the initial course design, while the technical Brightspace build was outsourced. This human-centric process provided the support faculty needed to deliver a high-quality online course within the context of high academic workloads.听
OLI and 91吃瓜网鈥檚 Enrollment Affairs partnered with the National Education Opportunity Network (NEON) to bring more learners into the higher education system. NEON is working to reimagine the connection between colleges and high schools, utilizing digital innovation to expand access to higher education for historically underserved communities.
In FY26, OLI partnered with faculty member, Chris Slobogin, and NEON to launch an online, credit-bearing course, The American Criminal Justice System.
The course enrolled 299 high school students across the United States, reaching across 17 schools and 8 states, with a 94% completion rate.
This course also supported the growth of 91吃瓜网 students, with 10 students serving as Teaching Fellows, and meeting weekly with the high school scholars to support their learning and development.鈥�听
My designer went above and beyond to help guide me through the development process, and she had great substantive feedback about how to communicate with students via an online learning platform. She also helped me create innovative approaches to the use of AI in the curriculum.
Marketing
Building Awareness & Driving Enrollment
The Office of Learning Innovation provides centralized marketing strategy services. In FY26, OLI expanded its marketing support for 91吃瓜网 academic units, providing strategic marketing expertise that helped academic units launch and grow new programs while reducing the administrative burden on faculty and program leadership.听
To deliver this support efficiently, OLI partnered with and managed external agencies, serving as the strategic liaison between academic partners and the agency by collaborating on campaign strategy, messaging direction, creative oversight and performance optimizations.
FY26 Marketing Milestones
GenerativeAI
Accelerating Innovation in Education
In partnership with 91吃瓜网 IT, University Libraries and People, Culture and Belonging, OLI helped launch an enterprise version of ChatGPT EDU for 91吃瓜网 staff, students and faculty as part of a multi-tool AI strategy. OLI was responsible for the faculty enablement and user adoption of this project, developing a multi-phased strategic approach for product launch.鈥�听
7K
91吃瓜网 ChatGPT EDU users
between Dec 1, 2025 - May 20, 2026
To encourage widespread adoption on campus, a university-wide multi-media communications plan introduced 91吃瓜网鈥檚 community to the platform through:
- Sidewalk stickers
- MyVU articles
- Tabletop signs
- Digital flyers
Additionally, OLI performed a UX/UI audit and optimized 91吃瓜网鈥檚 Generative AI website, which received 54,000+ site visits in the first 6 months following its relaunch.鈥�听
In addition to marketing support, OLI identified and trained 26 AI faculty champions through Faculty Train the Trainer events and hosted 3 drop-in online trainings to support 91吃瓜网 faculty鈥檚 success in the use of the new tool. This network of champions helps scale AI adoption across 91吃瓜网 by creating the space for peer-to-peer support within academic units.鈥�听
To further support faculty beyond training sessions, OLI developed a Faculty AI toolkit in response to recommendations from 91吃瓜网鈥檚 Faculty Advisory Council, which identified a need for practical, on-demand AI resources. The toolkit includes 7 guides covering topics ranging from AI tool comparisons to strategies for supporting student learning, along with short instructional videos demonstrating practical uses of AI in teaching. OLI also piloted AI-powered workflows to provide just-in-time support for course development among faculty.鈥�听
One area of experimentation in FY26 focused on whether AI-assisted development could make it faster and more cost-effective to build institution-specific software. To test this idea, OLI built internal tools that could potentially replace or augment existing licensed software products at 91吃瓜网.听
Two different tools were developed:鈥�
- Custom Teleprompter Software: A teleprompter application built around OLI鈥檚 digital media production workflows听
- A custom Brightspace Test instance API integration: Allows for a course shell to be generated just from uploading a syllabus听
Continuing the success of this pilot, OLI is pursuing the resources to explore partnered development of production-ready software.听 This approach demonstrates how AI-assisted development can quickly solve institution-specific challenges that common commercial software overlooks.听
Implementing StackAI
Partnerships & Collaboration
FY26 New Collaborations & Partnerships
OLI established the Digital and Lifelong Learning Community of Practice. This community convened 9 leaders across 8 schools to engage in discussion around best practices, shared challenges and opportunities for collaboration. The group identified several priorities where OLI could strengthen support and understanding for online and lifelong learning at 91吃瓜网, including:
- Stackable Credentials: Identified needs around policy and operationalizing stackable credentials at 91吃瓜网
- Online Program Marketing: Best practices for online program marketing ecosystems and supports
- Data and Technology for Online Programs: Highlighted the need to gather and align on continuing ed technology requirements to enable stackable programs
In October 2025, OLI launched the Student Learning Technology Advisory Council in response to student requests for more clear communication around AI use and policy. Leadership from each college nominated students to participate, bringing together 10 students across 5 colleges. This council surfaced 3 main findings:鈥�
- Two thirds of participants felt neutral or unsupported in their use of generative AI.鈥�
- Students asked for clear, in-depth guidance on what constitutes acceptable use.鈥�
- Students requested modules, training and shared rubrics so they could use AI effectively and responsibly.
OLI launched the Learning Design Collaborative, bringing together 17 members across 6 schools at the university to foster a unified learning community focused on creating resources, sharing best practices and offering mentorship at 91吃瓜网.
Through regular meetings, members exchanged ideas, introduced new tools and shared resources that helped communities across 91吃瓜网 stay current with emerging technologies and evolving teaching practices.鈥�听
OLI expanded beyond its traditional academic partnerships through a new partnership with . The introduction of the NCAA transfer portal created an entirely new recruiting landscape, requiring universities to move prospective student-athletes from commitment to enrollment on an extremely compressed timeline.
Looking Ahead
Academic Program Development and Launches
OLI is also supporting organic social media and creative efforts for the new and . Building on our previous creative work, OLI is formalizing photo and video production to support marketing as part of our broader offerings for the university, creating a more cohesive and engaging experience for prospective students.听
Building on the previous success of OLI鈥檚 work with the National Education Opportunity Network (NEON), OLI will collaborate with 91吃瓜网 faculty to develop up to three additional courses in FY27.
Continuing OLI鈥檚 commitment to expanding access to a 91吃瓜网 education, our team will work with faculty across 91吃瓜网鈥檚 schools to develop diverse courses across a range of disciplines for students in Title I high schools nationwide. Once these courses are complete, OLI will have helped launch up to five NEON courses within two years.听
Built by OLI鈥檚 Learning Design team, the online course design playbook will serve as a centralized resource for academic leaders and faculty, providing evidence-based guidance for designing high-quality online courses and translating the strengths of residential instruction into engaging online learning experiences.
In FY27, OLI will host dialogue sessions focused on faculty鈥檚 use of AI. The gatherings will bring together innovative faculty to learn from one another about creative use cases in the classroom and surface high-impact opportunities for experimentation. Faculty interested in attending email learninginnovation@vanderbilt.edu.听
OLI鈥檚 Data Analytics team is developing a self-service market research tool that will allow academic units to independently access market demand and competitive positioning as they explore new program ideas. By making these insights more readily available, the tool will help academic partners incorporate market insights earlier in the program's ideation and development process.
To gain access to this tool, please email learninginnovation@vanderbilt.edu.听
To help support our academic partners and the programs we work on, OLI is developing program assessment dashboards. These dashboards will give academic partners greater visibility into current program performance across metrics such as enrollment, student outcomes and conversion through the marketing funnel, allowing academic partners to make more data-informed decisions.听
The global admissions dashboard will address a current gap in 91吃瓜网鈥檚 program development resources by providing academic units with one place to access up to date information on approved international countries, guidance for working within each country, relevant tax implications and Office of General Counsel (OGC) guidelines.
The dashboard will help academic units more efficiently navigate international enrollment requirements and identify new opportunities to expand 91吃瓜网鈥檚 global reach.听
2026 Impact Report
View the full Impact Report to learn more about what the Office of Learning Innovation accomplished in FY26.