Americas Accreditation Conference

This is an opportunity to ask AACSB staff general accreditation or membership questions you may have.

Learn more about Data Direct and talk to our experts to see what resources are available to you.

Interact with our exhibitors to learn more about products and services that can help your organization.

Join us for a welcome message from AACSB International Leadership followed by the opening keynote session. In a rapidly evolving academic landscape, the call for business schools is clear: Be bold. Embrace change. Recognize that the status quo is no longer sufficient. Business school leaders are now tasked with not just adapting but pioneering the future of education, be it program redesign or identifying skills needed by industry, all the while learning innovative and trending topics. Join award-winning author Dan Pontefract in a keynote that champions a change-positive mindset. He will spotlight audacious strategies to navigate the challenges ahead and inspire your academic community to think differently. Through a compelling case study, Dan will delve into his transformative work with the University of Victoria’s TELUS MBA. This session is not just about understanding the need for change—it's a clarion call to be the change. Leave this keynote feeling inspired and ready to take your business school to the next level.

Learn from AACSB staff and an experienced Continuous Improvement Review Accreditation Committee member as they share valuable insights from PRT visits this year. Delve into crucial topics like DEIB legislation's effects on AACSB accreditation – both passed and pending. This interactive session will give you the opportunity to ask questions about the continuous improvement review accreditation process, including visit planning and execution strategies.

Learn from AACSB staff and an experienced Initial Accreditation Committee member as they share valuable insights from PRT visits this year, equipping you for a successful initial accreditation review visit. Delve into crucial topics like DEIB legislation's effects on AACSB accreditation – both passed and pending. This interactive session will give you the opportunity to ask questions about the initial accreditation process.

This session will give a high-level overview of what key elements make for a good strategic plan, with a focus on key performance indicators and developing a proper risk assessment. This session is in correlation with Standard 1 and will focus on how to identify unsystematic risks and mitigate major risks.

A key component of Standard 1: Strategic Planning is ensuring a strategic plan can evolve as needed to align with updated goals and the direction of the business school. Speakers will share key components to successfully refreshing a strategic plan, determine how to break the traditional mold of a five-year strategic plan, and learn how to embrace agile strategic planning. Participants will work together to discuss ways to transition to an agile mindset in the strategic planning process.

How can a business school develop a meaningful partnership with other institutions and organizations and why is it beneficial? Partnerships are interwoven throughout the Standards and a good partnership can help drive societal impact efforts, expand experiential learning opportunities, and drive impactful faculty intellectual contributions. Speakers will share the logistics of developing a global business school partnership, the benefits for both parties, as well as the challenges that can occur.

This is an opportunity to ask AACSB Staff general accreditation or membership questions you may have.

Learn more about Data Direct and talk to our experts to see what resources are available to you.

Interact with our exhibitors to learn more about products and services that can help your organization.

How does one operationalize lifelong learning and embed it into one’s strategy, programs and offerings? Learn best practices in sustaining continuous learning efforts and how to nurture the lifelong learning mindset of faculty with respect to their domain expertise.

This session will highlight key components of Standard 3 and share best practices in maintaining, supporting and deploying faculty. Learn how to ensure that your faculty members support your business school’s programs, mission, strategies, and expected outcomes.

Learn how schools are creatively and holistically embedding evaluation of teaching effectiveness and impact to their systematic processes.

You have identified the societal impact focus area and developed an impact statement for your business school, now what? Join Stephanie Bryant, EVP and Global Chief Accreditation Officer, in this hands-on interactive session that focuses on how to measure the success of your impact efforts. Learn what measures of success are appropriate in the societal impact space and common data validation criteria to ensure your business school is setting quality metrics.

In this session AACSB staff will walk attendees through the mandatory accreditation tables. Attendees will learn best practices and how to avoid common mistakes when completing accreditation tables. The session will review tables 2-1, 3-1, 3-2 and 8-1.

Reconnect with old friends, make new ones, and network with the exhibitors. Relax and enjoy the company of your colleagues.

This is an opportunity to ask AACSB staff general accreditation or membership questions you may have.

Learn more about Data Direct and talk to our experts to see what resources are available to you.

Interact with our exhibitors to learn more about products and services that can help your organization.

Join this member-driven community session to discuss "Including Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Continuous Improvement Review" Attendees will discuss how they included, or plan to include, DEIB in the CIR. Join the discussion or listen in.

How does the accreditation process positively impact your institution’s processes and organization culture? What are challenges your organization has had to face because of accreditation? How has accreditation sparked innovation and new ideas at your b-school? Join this session to hear best practices in moving through the accreditation process in a timely manner and how to keep the ball rolling in your strategic efforts. 

Generative AI requires us to reexamine our curriculum, our pedagogy, and our programs. Join this session to learn how to embrace generative AI to augment, enhance, and enrich students’ educational experiences, and to discuss the importance of evolving our programs to address the seismic changes AI is bringing to our classrooms and workplaces. You will leave with practical suggestions for evolving your curricula, developing learning objectives, managing assessment, and addressing academic integrity, both at the course and program level.

Learn strategies to approach various aspects of benchmarking, including understanding one’s competitive network and establishing measures of success.  

Learn about new AACSB data products on the horizon that your business school can utilize. Attendees will have time for Q&A with AACSB’s SVP and Global Chief Product Officer, Nick Igneri.

Over the decades, business education has adapted to the PC, the spreadsheet, the Internet, online learning, mobile devices, and hyper-connected students. In the rapidly evolving landscape of business education, incorporating AI trends presents crucial considerations. How can business schools effectively integrate AI into operations, faculty capabilities, and educational offerings? Striking the right balance is essential to avoid resource inefficiencies and maintain competitive positioning. This keynote panel, considering various perspectives, will delve into the challenges faced by schools in the age of AI, addressing conundrums and determining what industry and students expect from those shaping business education.

This is an opportunity to ask AACSB staff general accreditation or membership questions you may have.

Learn more about Data Direct and talk to our experts to see what resources are available to you.

Interact with our exhibitors to learn more about products and services that can help your organization.

Join this demo to learn how to navigate the revamped myAccreditation site for all of your AACSB and accreditation needs.

Bring your program and school research to a new level by learning how to make data assembly and report generation easy with Analytics Hub, a new free member tool. This demo will show how to enrich search results with enrollment numbers, budget surveys, salary statistics, and more. Learn how to summarize data with powerful visualizations and rapidly act on new ideas and questions with straightforward filters.

This interactive session will share anonymized feedback from recent Host School evaluations following their accreditation visits this year, including what went well, and where we can continue to improve the PRT visit experience. The session is aimed at helping PRT members and Host Schools alike see what’s working and what’s not so we can realize our goal of the AACSB PRT visit being a valued experience by all.

Developing and implementing an effective, sustainable assurance of learning process presents a challenge to most schools. Frequently faced challenges include process efficiency, faculty engagement and building a continuous improvement-focused culture, effectively using AoL data, and capturing the AoL process and its detail in effective documentation. This session will examine the most common challenges schools face creating and operating AoL processes including discussion of likely causes and simple solutions to overcome such challenges. Participants will complete an inventory designed to help them identify which challenges they are facing in their own assessment processes and which solutions are optimal for their context.

Join this session to hear unique challenges and opportunities two universities faced during their accreditation process. Presenters will discuss items including navigating a flat organization structure, managing limited resources, transitioning from the 2013 to 2020 standards, and experimenting with alternative solutions to accounting requirements. Learn how these organizations overcame their challenges and explore new opportunities to ensure a successful accreditation process.