AIM+Lab: Advancing & Innovating Miriam College
CIA Bootleg Manila designed and delivered an immersive and expansive strategy and innovation program for Miriam College called AIM+Lab (Advancing & Innovating Miriam). It was a collaborative process between us and the entire Miriam community that enabled us to direct the school’s trajectory with a new brand identity and promise, curriculum frameworks, interventions and programs.
Project Champions
Project Manager for Project A
Project Manager for Project A
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Overview
Miriam College (formerly known as Maryknoll) is a premier women's college in the Philippines that offers programs at the basic, tertiary, post-graduate and adult education levels.
In the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, Miriam College needed to determine its strategic directions and identify concrete opportunities for the school to pursue in the future, while addressing the current realities of the education landscape.
Our Solution
CIA Bootleg Manila designed and delivered AIM+Lab which stood for Advancing & Innovating Miriam, a multidimensional and collaborative research and strategizing project that engaged the entire school community.
The first stage of AIM+Lab was to completely immerse in Miriam College’s complex world. Our own researchers and Miriam College’s teachers studied the existing trends and innovations in education and learning, paying equal attention to administration trends. We studied local statistics and data pertaining to education – trends in careers, academic courses and degrees, the state of state universities and private schools, as well as techvoc and alternative learning modalities.
We also studied the current impressions and associations that parents and students have for Miriam College and other schools – from basic education to higher education.
In the second stage, we carefully critiqued Miriam College’s internal history, performance, strengths and weaknesses. Over twenty groups of teachers and administrators studied their respective units and departments, assessing how their current practices and processes aligned with the identified trends and market realities, as well as the school’s major goals. We also analyzed the school’s enrolment history on a per grade level. We studied and interviewed the school’s exemplary alumna and conducted tracer studies to see how the school’s graduates perform in the real world.
The immersive process culminated with the Miriam Strategic House Framework that integrated the school’s overall strategic destinations, value propositions to its students, and the findings from the external and internal research.
The strategic framework also included a new Miriam College brand identity that promised to create “Future-Ready Graduates” who exemplified Life Skills, Learning Skills and IMT Skills. We also identified the kinds of students that the school will forge –Multidimensional Children, Multidisciplinary Citizens, and Mindful Catalysts. The required learning competencies were likewise identified and rendered into curriculum frameworks.
All the major strategies were then translated into interventions and programs for the rest of the school – brand and marketing campaigns, faculty development, student engagement, learning environments, and international partnerships, among others.
The heads of the various academic and non-academic departments also generated their own strategies and priority programs, truly making AIM+Lab a collaborative project.
What We Did
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As a partner in our institutional strategic planning process, Bootleg helped facilitate the overall process in several ways: First, they evolved a clear and unified planning framework for our strategic teams to use in pulling out unit-specific threads and, from these details, pulling together a comprehensive or panoramic snapshot of the whole institution. Second, they helped the core strategy team to discern the key characteristics of the school, by providing us with an analytic tool to visualize our DNA. That was a very productive exercise, as it helped us boil down what our raison d'etre and eventually use it as a building block towards a clear mission statement. The Bootleg team listened to our concerns and provided solid advice on addressing them. All in all, I must say this partnership was instrumental in producing a five-year Plan that continues to be a working document for the institution's future development, as it moves forward. I must say the experience was a 'joyful' one for the core team. We felt we could rely on CBM to share your expertise and tools. So while there was hand-holding, we felt we were also gaining insights that we could build on to upgrade our business as a whole.
