EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award

About the Award

This award program recognizes innovations and initiatives centered on information technologies that provide groundbreaking solutions to major challenges in higher education, or change prevailing conditions in remarkable ways so as to allow new solutions to be developed and deployed.

Awards may apply to a variety of innovations and initiatives, including hardware, software, integrated systems, approaches to the use of technology, organizational transformations, and other types of advances that have proven to be truly influential and transformational for the higher education community.

The awards recognize initiatives that affect or are readily extensible to many environments within higher education and even a broader community. Initiatives must have come out of, or been aggressively and creatively adapted for, and benefited higher education; the primary, stakeholder interest must be within higher education. The award is not for commercial initiatives per se, although award-worthy entrepreneurial initiatives may have evolved into commercial commodities and even spawned new industries. Such efforts are often collaborative in nature, and their significance may not be evident for several years.

Anyone, within or outside of higher education, may submit nominations.

EXAMPLES of appropriate candidates:
The first two recipients of this award serve as examples of such efforts that have precipitated broad, multi-institutional impact.

• The 2006 award to course management systems (CMSs) the evolution of isolated good ideas for using technology to streamline course administration or enliven instruction into essential components of the integrated, IT-enabled higher education enterprise, as well as the collaborative process through which they evolved.
• In 2007, the award recognized uPortal as an initiative to develop a free, sharable, constantly evolving, enterprise-wide Web portal specifically for higher education. It was one of the first attempts to apply open-source technologies in a collaborative development environment now referred to as "community source," and its evolution is part of an ongoing dynamic between commercial and educational interests as well as judiciously applied foundation support.

Award recipients are selected by the EDUCAUSE Recognition Committee, which may choose to grant no awards or multiple awards in a given year.

EDUCAUSE awards are sponsored by SunGard Higher Education, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner.

Recognition

Award recipients are recognized at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The name of each recipient is added to a multi-year trophy specially designed for this program by Colorado artist John Haertling which is on permanent display in the EDUCAUSE Boulder office and which is also displayed at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. A featured session at the Annual Conference is dedicated to the award, and an overview of the initiative is added to the gallery of award winners on the EDUCAUSE Web site.

Nominations

Nomination Form
The nomination deadline for the 2009 Catalyst Award is February 1, 2009.

Recipients

Catalyst Award Recipients