Agenda At-A-Glance

Sunday, November 1 (Optional Arrival Evening)

Arrive early, settle in, and reconnect before the conference begins.

6:00 – 9:00 pm Informal Networking & Campfire Connections

Registration opens. Arrive early and reconnect over the CMED story-swap tradition, wins, misses, and lessons from the year, shared over conversation and refreshments. No slides, no structure, just the peer exchange that makes this community what it is. Attendees are welcome to head out for dinner in groups whenever they like through the evening.

Monday, November 2

IMAGINE, the market our centers and clients are walking into.

8:30–9:00 am Opening: Welcome, Agenda Overview & Board Introductions

Conference Co-Chairs

9:00–10:30 am Opening Keynote: Coaching for High Performance: Lessons from the Olympic Arena to the Boardroom (Monique Kavelaars)

Discover how principles from elite sport can transform leadership development. Olympian and Third Factor’s Trainer and Director of Assessments and Team Coaching, Monique Kavelaars, explores how coaching creates high-performing leaders, teams, and cultures.

As executive education evolves, organizations are seeking new ways to develop leaders who can adapt, perform, and thrive in increasingly complex environments. Against the backdrop of Los Angeles preparing to host the next Olympic Games, this plenary session explores what the world of elite sport can teach us about building high-performance cultures and unlocking human potential. For centers and organizations to thrive in the months ahead, leaders must help their people navigate constant change: coaching them through new learning curves, building confidence and competence, and creating the conditions for continuous growth and improvement. The same principles that enable elite athletes and teams to perform at the highest levels can help organizations develop leaders who inspire, support, and elevate those around them.

10:30–11:00 am Break

11:00–12:00 pm Concurrent Session 1: Choose one:

The Small Center Playbook: “Doing More with Less” (Sarah Andrews, Executive Director, Vistex Institute for Executive Education, Lehigh University & Stephanie Lowe, Senior Director, Executive Education, University of Alabama)

Small teams get held to the same expectations as much larger shops – same growth targets, same quality, same service. Hear how lean centers pull it off – the operating models, prioritization decisions, and time-saving systems that allow a lean shop to perform well above its size, spanning revenue growth, marketing, faculty, budgets, and customer service. Come away with practical approaches and real examples you can adapt to your own context.

Best Practices in Working with Corporate L&D Teams

Corporate learning-and-development buyers have become more sophisticated, more measured, and more accountable to their own executives. To stand out, universities must as agile, strategic partners rather than “vendors”. Discover how to be the university partner they keep coming back to: understanding how L&D teams are evaluated, speaking their language of business outcomes, navigating procurement, and building the kind of trusted relationship that turns a single program into a multi-year account.

12:00–1:00 pm Lunch

1:00–2:00 pm Concurrent Session 2: Choose one:

The Future of the Exec Ed Center: Reinventing the Executive Education Value Proposition (Luigi Pecoraro, Director, Executive Education and Leadership Development)

University centers face real competition from consultants, online platforms, corporate universities, and alternative credential providers. We’ll confront the hard question directly: what do university-based centers uniquely offer, and how should that value be articulated in 2026 and beyond? Attendees will examine what today’s clients actually value, where the traditional model is eroding, and how to reposition their center’s story around outcomes, credibility, and experiences that competitors can’t easily copy.

Filling the Room: Open Enrollment Portfolio, Positioning, and Promotion (Cheryl Bates, Director, Open Enrollment, Executive Education, University of Texas at Austin)

Open enrollment is among the hardest lines to build, fill, and sustain – especially on a modest marketing budget. Join for a candid discussion that tackles the real problems: filling seats with limited marketing budgets, deciding what to do when a program doesn’t make money, building a coherent open-enrollment portfolio rather than a scattered catalog, and knowing when to refresh, reprice, or retire an offering.

2:00–2:15 pm Break

2:15–3:15 pm Concurrent Session 3: Choose one:

They’re Already in the Room: Programming for the Next Generation of Leaders (Nancy Scott, Leadership Development Program Director, Executive Education, University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

The next generation of leaders is already enrolling in our programs, and they arrive with different expectations about how, why, and where they learn. Explore what emerging leaders are truly seeking from a learning experience, how to design programs that meet them there without abandoning rigor, and how centers can turn generational change from a threat into a source of fresh, relevant, in-demand programming.

Data-Driven Decision-Making for Continuing & Executive Education

Most centers sit on more data than they use – enrollment patterns, marketing performance, pipeline activity, program evaluations – yet still make key decisions on instinct. Learn how to turn everyday center data into better calls on what to launch, what to cut, where to spend marketing dollars, and how to demonstrate impact upward to deans and CLOs. Practical dashboards and metrics over data-science theory.

3:15–3:30 pm Break

3:30–4:00 pm Plenary B: Afternoon Plenary, with lead-in to the Innovation Showcase

4:30–6:00 pm Happy Hour & Reception · Innovation Contest Showcase

Poster-style showcase of attendee innovations over food and drinks; attendees vote for the winner.

6:00–8:00 pm Dinner on Your Own

Tuesday, November 3

INNOVATE, a field day in Pasadena, then hands-on building.

8:30 am–12:00 pm Experiential Learning: Choose one experience (transportation provided from the Omni):

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena

Go behind the gates of the world’s leading center for robotic space exploration, managed by Caltech for NASA. Attendees tour mission operations, spacecraft assembly, and the facilities where missions to other planets are built and flown, then step back to consider the real question for our field: how does an organization tackling genuinely impossible problems build teams, manage risk, sustain innovation, and keep learning at its core? A rare, memorable look at engineering culture at its most ambitious, framed for what executive-education leaders can carry home. (JPL is a federal NASA facility: government-issued ID is required for every visitor, and foreign nationals must be cleared well in advance; citizenship details are collected at registration.)

12:00–1:30 pm Transportation to the hotel and Lunch

1:30–2:00 pm Break

2:00–4:30 pm Workshops:

(W1) Work Better with AI – Applied AI for Executive Education Leaders (ExperiencePoint)

A highly interactive lab where participants move beyond prompting to redesign real workflows, build practical AI agents, and experience an applied learning approach they can adapt for their own organizations. Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how knowledge work gets done, yet many executives remain stuck using AI as a faster search engine or writing assistant. This highly interactive Launchpad Lab is designed for participants who already use AI and are ready to redesign the way work actually happens.

Working individually and in small groups, participants will identify a recurring task, map the current workflow, and redesign it by intentionally deciding which activities should be automated, augmented by AI, or remain human-led. Along the way, they will build practical AI agents, experiment with proven prompting techniques, and apply a simple framework for balancing automation with human judgment.

The session models the principles of applied learning throughout: participants leave having made meaningful progress on work that matters to them, rather than simply learning about AI concepts.

2:00–3:15 pm

(W2A) Beyond Just Content: Driving Memorable Experiences with Blended Delivery (NovoEd)

NovoEd will explore how Exec Ed providers create opportunities for learners to apply new skills through workplace projects, peer interaction, and AI-powered practice environments, including AI Roleplay. As content becomes increasingly accessible through AI and digital channels, executive education providers face a new challenge: how do you create learning experiences that participants cannot get elsewhere? The answer lies not in delivering more content, but in designing memorable experiences that drive practice, reflection, and collaboration to realize true workplace impact.

In this session, NovoEd and executive education leaders will share how they are evolving program design to move learning beyond the classroom and into the flow of work. Through real-world examples, we’ll explore approaches for extending engagement, supporting skill development, and creating opportunities for meaningful practice before, during, and after live learning experiences. We’ll also examine how emerging capabilities like AI-powered roleplay enable learners to rehearse critical conversations, leadership decisions, and workplace challenges in realistic, scalable environments while receiving immediate, applicable feedback.

Attendees will leave with practical ideas for designing programs that differentiate through experience, accelerate skill application, and demonstrate meaningful impact in an increasingly AI-enabled learning landscape.

3:30–4:30 pm

(W2B) Reimagining Executive Education: Partnerships as a Catalyst for Growth and Innovation (Third Factor and Kinetic Partners)

A panel and working session on unlocking growth, innovation, and market responsiveness through external partnerships, ending with a practical toolkit to evaluate, structure, and launch them.

As demand grows for customized, experiential, and scalable learning, many centers are being pushed beyond the limits of their internal faculty models. Yet the real constraint is not opportunity, it is internal friction: faculty politics, procurement complexity, and uncertainty around maintaining quality and brand integrity. This working session positions partnerships as a strategic growth lever. But not all partnerships create value. The difference lies in how they are designed, structured, and integrated.

Participants will explore how leading centers collaborate with, and bring together, facilitators, practitioners, and subject matter experts to expand their portfolios and meet evolving client needs. Designed to be highly interactive, this session moves beyond discussion into application. This session provides a practical roadmap for building and leveraging strategic partnerships, exploring different partnership models – from co-delivery and co-design to fully integrated program partnerships, and learning how to align these relationships with institutional goals, client expectations, and program outcomes.

Through real-world examples and interactive discussion, attendees will identify opportunities to expand their offerings, enhance participant experience, and increase scalability – without sacrificing quality or brand integrity. Participants will leave with a practical, ready-to-use toolkit, including partner evaluation criteria, stakeholder messaging frameworks, and partnership design templates to support buy-in and enable immediate implementation.

4:30–5:30 pm Swag Swap & Networking

Bring your center’s branded swag; leave with everyone else’s.

6:00–8:00 pm Dinner on Your Own

Wednesday, November 4

INSPIRE, from a glimpse of the future to a plan for Monday morning.

8:30 am–12:00 pm Experiential Learning: Immersive Tour of Dataland, the Museum of AI Arts, The Grand LA

A short walk up Grand Avenue from the Omni, Dataland is the world’s first museum devoted entirely to AI arts, housed at The Grand LA beside Walt Disney Concert Hall. Step inside a fully immersive, AI-native environment where vast datasets, from the natural world, human culture, and beyond, are transformed in real time into floor-to-ceiling generative art, responsive sound, and even scent. This is not a screening you watch from your seat; it surrounds you, shifts as you move through it, and responds to the room. We’ll experience the exhibition together and then step back, facilitated through the lens of executive-education design, to ask what an omni-sensory, machine-generated space reveals about how adults notice, feel, and learn. Expect to leave provoked about what “a learning environment” could become. A short facilitated debrief on site, “from Dataland to your classroom,” turns the experience into design ideas for your own programs before we go for lunch.

12:00–1:00 pm Lunch

1:00–2:00 pm Concurrent Session 4: Choose one:

AI in Action: Best Practices Directly from Centers

AI was the single most requested topic in last year’s evaluations, with attendees specifically asking to see how peers are using it right now. We’ll showcase real examples of what’s working – marketing, proposals, customer service, program design, etc. Get inspired by practical, bite-sized ideas you can take back to your own team to boost everyday productivity, along with an honest look at where AI belongs versus where human judgment still wins.

Practical Creativity for Executive Education Learning Spaces (Janet Redwine, Director of Program Success, Executive Education, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver)

Executive education prepares leaders to navigate increasingly complex challenges, yet many classrooms still emphasize analysis over creativity. This interactive session introduces a practical, research-backed toolkit built specifically for adult learners and executive education environments. Participants will explore why creativity matters for professional success, how learning spaces can foster creative thinking, and simple habits that make individuals more innovative in their daily work. Through demonstrations of engaging classroom activities, attendees will experience techniques they can immediately adapt for leadership, management, and professional development programs and leave with evidence-based strategies and concrete resources to cultivate creativity in their own learning spaces.

2:00–2:15 pm Break

2:15–3:15 pm Closing Keynote: To be announced

3:15–3:30 pm Break

3:30–4:00 pm Closing Plenary: Inspiration to Action

4:00–4:30 pm Conference Close · Announcing CMED 2027 in Nashville, TN for the 50th Anniversary!

This agenda is subject to change without notice. Topics and presenters marked “to be announced” are still being confirmed by the Advisory Board.