Catalyst Award

The Catalyst Award, retired in 2012

About the Award

After considerable deliberation, the EDUCAUSE Recognition Committee did not select a Catalyst Award recipient for 2011. There were several strong contenders in the community; however, none were judged to fully meet the award guidelines or had established a record of sustained impact. In 2012, EDUCAUSE will be retiring the Catalyst Award and introducing new awards to broaden our ability to recognize innovation in our community.

EDUCAUSE Catalyst Awards are given in recognition of initiatives, projects, programs or concepts that provide groundbreaking solutions to major challenges in higher education or change prevailing conditions so as to allow new solutions to be developed and deployed in remarkable and even watershed ways.

These awards may recognize technology innovation, hardware, software, integrated systems, organizational advances, and other types of achievements that are truly outstanding and transformational for the higher education community. Catalyst award winners will already have had significant demonstrable impact that is extensible to other environments within higher education and, perhaps, a broader community.

Award-worthy efforts are often collaborative in nature, and their impact may not be evident for several years.

Recipients

2009 - Federated Identity Management Systems - a complex, far-reaching web of initiatives that has had broad impact on higher education and its partners in less than a decade.

2008 - The Regional Networks that evolved in the late 1980s and early 1990s were an essential part of the collaborative dynamics that created the Internet. This award is sponsored by SunGard Higher Education, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner.

2007 - The uPortal project is an initiative to develop a free, sharable, constantly evolving, enterprise-wide Web portal specifically for higher education. This award is sponsored by SunGard Higher Education, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner.

2006 - Course management systems (CMSs) have evolved from isolated good ideas for using technology to streamline course administration or enliven instruction into essential components of the integrated, IT-enabled higher education enterprise. This award is sponsored by SunGard Higher Education, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner.