Augmented reality (AR) is part of our daily lives, making everyday tasks easier, safer, and more interactive. However, its greatest potential may lie in education, opening new doors for engaging students through hands-on learning.
Most people use augmented reality every day without realizing it. Features like “See this in your room” at major online retailers let users visualize furniture in their space before buying, while backup cameras in cars overlay guidelines to help drivers reverse and park safely. These applications seamlessly blend the digital with the real, providing extra context to inform decisions and deepen understanding.
Now, imagine a student struggling with ratios — a common challenge because ratios require proportional reasoning and dimensional analysis, abstract skills that can be difficult to visualize.
Like “See this in your room”, what if an augmented reality app presented the student with a virtual kitchen counter on their desk, stocked with ingredients for trail mix? The student must mix the correct proportions of raw nuts, raw seeds, and dried fruit, adjusting quantities as they go. Bonus: No mess and no actual cooking. It only requires a smartphone, tablet, or laptop.
This fun, real-world approach helps students learn challenging concepts through play and interaction. It’s one of many activities in McGraw Hill AR, a free app from McGraw Hill, a leading global education company.
Sean Ryan
President, McGraw Hill School
“Immersive technology has the potential to make previously out-of-reach knowledge accessible for any learner,” said Sean Ryan, president of McGraw Hill’s School Group. “McGraw Hill AR will be a game-changer for teachers, particularly in math and science, where the detailed, interactive learning experiences will spark students’ curiosity and drive them to dive into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of complex, abstract concepts.”
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Reaching students across subjects, languages, and platforms
Yes, the app is really free. McGraw Hill builds the app in partnership with Verizon Innovative Learning. This educational initiative seeks to help bridge the digital divide with a goal of providing digital skills training to 10 million students by 2030.
To help reach those students, the app has a growing library across math, science, and social studies, with plans to add English Language Arts in 2025. It’s available in the App Store and Google Play Store. For students learning on Chromebooks or laptops, there are 3D web-based versions at mharonline.com. All activities are available in Spanish. For educators and homeschoolers, content is standards-aligned with accompanying lesson plans and worksheets at verizon.com/learning.
By combining play with practical learning, McGraw Hill AR offers a new way to connect, engage, and learn.
When I became president of the University of La Verne in 2011, I often shared the story of why I was drawn to this role—and why it resonated so deeply with my family’s values. My husband and I were committed to raising our daughters in a community that embraced inclusivity, service, and the transformative power of education. These were not just abstract ideals; they were principles we wanted to live by and instill in our children. And sharing this connection wasn’t just about explaining my leadership—it was about building trust and fostering relationships across campus.
Today, as higher education leaders face unprecedented scrutiny—from political attacks on academic freedom and diversity efforts to growing public skepticism about the value of a college degree—this kind of authenticity and connection is more critical than ever. Our institutions are being challenged to prove their relevance and align their missions with the needs of diverse and sometimes skeptical communities. In this climate, personal storytelling offers a powerful way to build bridges, humanize our roles, and reaffirm the values that define higher education. In navigating the complexities of our current environment, storytelling is not just a leadership tool—it’s a leadership imperative.
Why personal storytelling matters
Building authentic relationships: Personal stories bridge the gap between leaders and campus communities. Sharing your experiences, challenges, and successes makes your role more relatable and human. When leaders share stories authentically, we foster trust and encourage deeper connections with our students, faculty, alumni, donors, and other stakeholders. A compelling story has a way of bringing people together, sparking that feeling of connection through common experiences.
Inspiring action and change: Stories are powerful motivators. They show how education can transform lives, encouraging students to pursue their dreams, sparking innovation among faculty, and connecting with alumni and donors. At the University of La Verne’s annual Scholarship Gala, I used to share my mother’s story—how, as an immigrant, she stayed committed to education despite countless challenges. When she, her two older sisters, and their parents first immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia, they had to build a new life, learn a new language, and adapt to new customs. My grandfather would bring used tires to their home, where the family would cut them into small squares and sew them together to create doormats. He sold these mats door-to-door, and the money they earned not only supported their daily life but was also saved so that my mother could attend nursing school.
Each year following my story, students would respond with their own incredible stories of resilience. Those moments didn’t just inspire greater scholarship donations—they raised awareness about the challenges that so many students face, underscoring just how vital access to education really is.
Shaping institutional culture: Personal stories are a big part of what shapes a university’s identity, creating a sense of inclusion, resilience, and shared values. Early on in my time at the University of La Verne, a board member told me why the university—her alma mater—meant so much to her and why she chose to give back as a donor and leader. She often spoke about how she and her husband met while attending La Verne, and that they both loved the supportive and inclusive environment at the university. Then one of her children enrolled, and a particular professor took him under his wing and helped him with his academic career. She felt La Verne was always there when she and her family needed support.
Her story stuck with me, and I shared it often as an example of how personal connections can inspire others to support the university’s mission. By encouraging storytelling like this, we brought our community closer together and reinforced our shared purpose.
Engaging with diversity: Every story brings something unique to a campus community. When we make room for diverse voices, we naturally build stronger connections and a sense of belonging. Serving on the board of Antioch University, I’ve had the privilege of hearing a wide range of students and faculty share their experiences—some inspiring, some challenging, all meaningful. These moments are a great reminder of how much we gain when we listen to and learn from each other.
Strategies for Effective Storytelling
Connect stories to the institution’s mission: Personal stories are powerful, but they work best when they connect back to the institution’s goals. I once attended a university event where the president’s stories, while memorable, didn’t really support the message of the institution—they overshadowed it, leaving the audience entertained but not necessarily inspired about the university’s future. It’s a good reminder that storytelling should always reinforce the mission and build confidence in what lies ahead.
Balance sharing with relevance: Finding the right balance between personal and professional storytelling is key. Oversharing can make people uncomfortable or distract from your message. A story might be heartfelt, but if it’s too detailed, the audience might lose track of why it matters. The best approach is to share meaningful anecdotes that highlight your points while keeping your audience and the setting in mind.
Maintain honesty and humility: The best stories come from a place of honesty and humility—they build credibility and trust. Think about great leaders: the ones who acknowledge the contributions of others tend to connect more than those who focus on their own achievements. On the flip side, self-congratulatory stories can feel off-putting and even break trust with the audience. Keep it grounded, which always resonates better.
Avoid unethical exaggeration: Stretching the facts or making up stories can seriously damage trust. And people can usually tell when a story isn’t genuine, whether it’s because of over-the-top details or a lack of authenticity in the delivery. It’s important for leaders to stay honest, sharing meaningful details without straying from reality. In today’s world, where fact-checking is everywhere, even small inconsistencies can hurt your credibility—and by extension, the reputation of your institution. Keep it real, and your message will always carry more weight.
Repetition without redundancy: Repeating key messages can really help drive them home, but it’s all about balance. When you tell the same story to different audiences, it can show consistency and authenticity, which is great. But if you overdo it, people might start to tune out, feeling like they’ve heard it too many times. We all recycle our favorite speeches and stories when we speak often, and that’s fine as long as we’re mindful of keeping it fresh. A thoughtful approach to storytelling means your message stays powerful without losing its impact.
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Personal storytelling is one of the most powerful tools leaders in higher education have at their disposal. When done right, it builds trust, inspires action, and strengthens the sense of community. Sharing authentic stories helps connect audiences to the mission and values of an institution, creating a shared sense of purpose and vision.
As higher education continues to navigate challenges like public skepticism and political scrutiny, storytelling offers a way to highlight the transformative power of education. It allows us to address concerns with honesty and integrity, while keeping the focus on the positive impact education has on individuals and society. Reaching beyond the academy, these stories help build connections with the wider community—and ideally, around the world—showing how education shapes lives and strengthens society.
dotEDU Global Voices
This December, ACE will feature a special podcast series, dotEDU Global Voices, which will spotlight personal stories from accomplished international women university presidents. These leaders share their unique challenges, insights, and strategies, offering authentic and inspiring perspectives on leadership.
The series builds on my book, Spotlighting Female Leadership: Strategies, Stories, Perspectives, which highlights the journeys of ten accomplished university presidents. To learn more, download the book here and tune into the podcast for further inspiration.
Applying a Strategic Framework to Your Organizational Plan
“It’s Groundhog Day … again,” said Phil Connors, a disgruntled weatherman.
In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Phil Connors knew what it was like to experience life as an endless series of tedious events that recur in the same way day after day. And many of us working in online education management — especially in a highly competitive environment — can begin to feel like Phil did.
Receive enrollment targets. Develop and launch annual marketing campaigns. Pursue prospective students. Track students’ applications to completion. Onboard students. Repeat.
But when do you have time to reflect and analyze? When do you pause long enough to identify areas in need of improvement? How do you plan for innovation, growth, or testing when all of your time is spent on the status quo?
In my recent article on building online student services, we discussed the importance of assessing your organizational design and effectiveness to identify improvement opportunities and facilitate high-quality growth. My latest article on the organizational development journey took the discussion a step further to describe the steps involved in developing a multiyear approach to stakeholder engagement around strategic initiatives.
With this article, we address the concept of escape velocity. We’ll show you how a multiyear strategic growth road map can help your organization break free from its Groundhog Day cycle and launch it into tomorrow.
Why a Multiyear Strategic Road Map Matters
In higher education, we’re accustomed to having a university-level strategic plan with broad themes and objectives. These plans are useful in that they allow academic and service units to identify areas of contribution or special projects.
Less common, however, is a performance road map for the unit-level organization itself. Specific programs and functions may have goals, targets, or expected outcomes, but do they collectively add up to something more than the sum of parts? Are teams competing against one another for resources or prospects? Have the true bottlenecks in processes and infrastructure been identified so that teams can tackle them together, or are they each working on problems in a silo?
A multiyear strategic road map aligns the work you and your colleagues are doing today with the work to be done next year — and the year after that — to reach new levels of achievement, performance, and value. This means moving beyond “keeping the lights on” to building a true organizational vision where day-to-day tasks and operations contribute to a larger mission.
The multiyear road map also works to keep everyone accountable, so that the organization can escape the gravitational pull of mere survival, instead moving up through the atmosphere into new spaces and opportunities.
Importantly, the road map is not developed by a small group of people and then handed down from organizational leadership. It requires a strategic conversation across the organization that identifies what winning looks like and how all parties will win together.
Introducing the Hoshin Kanri Strategic Framework
A simple search for “strategic framework” in your browser or artificial intelligence tool will bring up 25 to 50 options, which can feel overwhelming. As you dig into the variety of frameworks, you realize that each has a specific purpose and most are not interchangeable. For example, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis can be used to understand your organization’s general position in the current environment, while the Ansoff matrix can help you dive into your individual products and their specific markets.
In our opinion, if you want to develop an organization-wide multiyear strategic road map, the Hoshin Kanri framework is a powerful tool.
The Hoshin Kanri framework originated in Japan after World War II and was historically used in the manufacturing and technology industries (think Toyota). However, the framework can apply to any industry including higher education. The words “hoshin” and “kanri” mean direction and administration, which in this context refers to identifying the most important strategic focus areas for the next three to five years, and then managing activities and delivering against annual objectives in those focus areas.
To fully engage with the framework, there are seven steps that move from vision development to planning and execution to bidirectional feedback management, which makes this framework different from those that only focus on one of those aspects.
At its core, the framework is an iterative blueprint for escape velocity — where everyone’s contributions align and where individuals are responsible for providing direct, productive, and sometimes even uncomfortable feedback about progress, barriers, and how the plans are working. This feedback loop is one of the most powerful parts of the model for organization-wide deep listening and trust-building.
In the next section, we will discuss each part of the framework.
Breaking Down the Hoshin Kanri Model Components
As we walk through the components of the Hoshin Kanri model, remember that models and frameworks are suggestions or guidelines on how to organize a strategy, not directives. Every organization is different, and you should feel free to make the model your own.
Step 1: Establish (or Revisit and Refine) Your Organizational Vision
A multiyear road map, by definition, requires a vision for where your organization could or should be three to five years from now. While it’s easy to understand what you want your organization to “escape” from in terms of the status quo, it’s more work to determine the opportunity space, the direction of progress, and the velocity at which the organization should move there.
This is often the point where organizations need external support: fresh eyes to assess the market opportunities and the organizational development opportunities (e.g., a good, better, best model). Once the organizational vision is defined, communication and socialization of that vision to every individual in the organization is critical for feedback, engagement, and buy-in.
Step 2: Establish Strategic Focus Areas (aka Stretch Goals)
Here’s where your organization places its bets. What are the three to five focus areas that define how your organization will escape the status quo and strategically move into a new level of opportunity, performance, or achievement?
Think big swings that are a stretch but still possible. Think about what would get individuals in your organization excited about the work.
Remember, these strategic focus areas flow from the organizational vision. Some of the areas will be quantitative in nature (e.g., grow enrollments by 20% year over year; improve satisfaction scores by 40%), and some may be more qualitative (e.g., develop an organizational decision-making framework and process). All areas should be measurable.
Step 3: Break Strategic Areas of Focus Into Annual Objectives
In this stage of the process, your organization works backward from those strategic focus areas to plot the annual steps of achievement and progress. These objectives are established at the organizational level.
Step 4: Cascade Annual Objectives Into Programmatic and Functional Objectives
In this stage, program and function leaders develop their annual objectives based on the annual organizational-level objectives and begin to determine the key performance indicators for their teams.
This is also the step where the organization agrees upon an objective-level primary plan owner. Which individual is accountable for progress against the objective, for escalations when progress is impeded, and for communication of wins? Does that individual agree that the resource base to support the objective is sufficient?
Step 5: Execute
In this implementation stage, plans are deployed and progress is measured.
Steps 6 and 7: Conduct Monthly and Annual Reviews
The Hoshin Kanri model builds in regular strategic road map and annual plan feedback loops to ensure bidirectional feedback and iteration are employed where needed.
The frequency of your periodic reviews within an annual cycle may depend on the size and structure of your organization. The model suggests monthly plan reviews. But for some organizations, monthly reviews are too frequent and quarterly reviews are preferred. For other organizations, such as start-ups, monthly reviews are not frequent enough and biweekly sprint-level reviews may be needed.
The core idea is to ensure that those who are implementing against annual plans have the opportunity to discuss progress, blockers, resource concerns, and more so that leadership can determine if adjustments to the plans are necessary.
The annual review is the time to consider progress against the multiyear vision. Is the organization on target? Does the team need to be even more ambitious given evolving market conditions, the competitive landscape, or technological advances? Does the organization need to adjust its resource planning or design to support progress?
Organizational Strategic Road Map: An At-a-Glance View
As you can see from the seven steps detailed above, the Hoshin Kanri model is basically a series of embedded to-do lists with metrics and owners attached to them. The plan can be created in a document that displays the action items in a sequential order with as many words as it takes to describe the holistic plan. There is nothing wrong with this approach, as long as the organization can access, understand, and execute against the plan.
However, there is a way to develop a visual tool — without fancy applications or systems — that summarizes the entirety of the plan so that everyone can see themselves aligned with both the long-term and immediate objectives. This method is called the X-matrix. It works well with a spreadsheet tool, for example. In our graphic example below, we’ve replaced the “X” with a compass visual, but an X works just as well.
Within a box in your spreadsheet, create your “X” by inserting crossed lines. This creates four quadrants. In Hoshin Kanri, these quadrants are classified with compass directions: north, south, east, and west (hence our graphical treatment).
An organization starts with the south quadrant (or bottom of the X). This is where you list the three to five strategic areas of focus. Each area of focus has its own row. In our graphic, these are the bottom three rows in the light blue, orange, and dark blue colors.
In the west quadrant, you can list the high-level annual objectives for the year. Use the spreadsheet rows to enter an “x” where the strategic area of focus (on the bottom) matches the individual high-level annual objective (shown here as columns to the left that correspond in color).
Then, move to the north quadrant. This is where you list the business-level objectives that flow from the annual objectives. What are the specific tasks for each program and function? You can use the spreadsheet rows to enter an “x” where the business-level objective aligns with the high-level annual objective. In our example here, all three business-level objectives in the top rows correspond to the strategic focus area and the high-level annual objective color-coded in light blue.
Keep the east quadrant blank for a moment. This is where key targets or key performance indicators (KPIs) will go, and again, once you complete these, you can use the spreadsheet model to put an “x” where the target aligns with the individual business-level objective. In our version, we’ve used slightly different shades of light blue to show which KPIs go with which business-level objectives.
Go to the Resources section of the spreadsheet. Here you can document the accountable owner of the business-level objective, and use the spreadsheet rows to note with an “x” which owner is aligned with the particular initiative. You can use primary and secondary owners or just stick with primary owners, depending on your organization’s size and structure. These owners can then finalize the east quadrant with the specific KPIs in coordination with organizational leadership.
Depending on your organization’s size and structure, you can develop one master-level version of this multiyear plan, or you can develop one per program or function for ease of use. If spreadsheets are not of interest, there are online applications and services (some are free; some are fee-based) that serve as an interactive platform on which you and your teams can manage the development and tracking of objectives and progress.
Build Your Multiyear Growth Road Map
Engineering your escape velocity from Groundhog Day to the future takes introspection, time, iteration, and communication in all directions. Strategic tools and frameworks, like Hoshin Kanri, are not always necessary, but they can help your teams organize against a vision with plans, processes, and performance conversations.
No matter the tool, framework, or steps you take, the payoff of using introspection and planning to achieve your multiyear targets is escape velocity from the tethers of winter doldrums into a spring of new growth.
The strategy and development team at Archer Education can help you develop and achieve your multiyear strategic road map goals. Contact us today.
