Dr. C. Edward Watson is the Vice President for Digital Innovation with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). There, he leads the association’s national and state-level advocacy to advance quality in undergraduate student learning. This includes programming and a scholarly agenda that focuses on general education, teaching and learning practice, and evidence-based instruction enhanced by technology. For the latter, key foci include artificial intelligence (A.I.), digital equity, and open learning. “Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) is his latest book. His book series on General Education Reform (Routledge) will arrive in early 2025.

Prior to joining AAC&U in the summer of 2017, Dr. Watson was the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia (UGA) where he led university efforts associated with faculty development, TA development, student learning outcomes assessment, learning technologies, media production services, classroom support and learning spaces, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. He also taught a range of courses on College Teaching, Student Learning, and Course Design. He continues to serve as a Fellow in the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at UGA.

Dr. Watson has 25 years of experience in faculty and instructional development. Dr. Watson has been an invited keynote speaker on campuses and at a variety of conferences, including events by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching, the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, the Teaching Professor Conference, the Leadership in Higher Education Conference, the Assessment Institute and others. He was also recently quoted in the New York Times, CNN, Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, Campus Technology, Diverse Education, EdSurge, University Business Magazine, UK Financial Times, and Consumer Reports regarding teaching and learning issues and trends in higher education.

Dr José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Southampton (UK), then as a dean at Miami University and SMU and as President of Goucher College (voted a Top 10 Most Innovative College under his leadership). Bowen has appeared on five continents as a musician and has performed with Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Liberace, and many others. His compositions include a symphony (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1985), and music for Jerry Garcia. Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford University (in Chemistry, Music, and Humanities) has written over 100 scholarly articles, is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), and an editor of the 6-CD set, Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (2011). He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and has three TED talks. In 2010, Stanford honored him as a Distinguished Alumni Scholar.

Bowen has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, PBS News Hour, and on NPR. His book Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology out of your College Classroom will Improve Student Learning (2012) won the Ness Award for Best Book on Higher Education from the American Association of Colleges and Universities). It was followed by Teaching Naked Techniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes with C. Edward Watson (2017) and Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience and Reflection (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). He was given a Stanford Centennial Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 1990 and he has presented keynotes and workshops at more than 300 campuses and conferences 46 states and 17 countries around the world. His new book with C. Edward Watson is Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (Johns Hopkins University Press).

After twenty years of innovation educational leadership, he was awarded the Ernest L. Boyer Award (for significant contributions to American higher education) from the New American Colleges and Universities in 2018 and is now a senior fellow for the American Association of Colleges and Universities. He lives in Dallas and also does innovation and inclusion consulting for a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies.