A Hub-and-Spoke Model for Meaningful Program Development

Thanks to my colleagues, Dr. Kim Grant and Dr. Natasha Kenny, for sparking such a valuable conversation on lifelong learning with our community. I’m inspired by their prompts for reflection and, in particular, their question about how we can “design meaningful and authentic teaching, learning, and assessment activities that prepare students for their future work and help them think about their impact on society” (2026). 

This is a central domain in our Academic Innovation Plan—that UCalgary offers student experiences that foster not only “the skills, knowledge, and personal attributes necessary to contribute as citizens and leaders in their chosen fields,” but also “a sense of community, belonging, and curiosity that will live on for a lifetime” (2023, p. 3). These are big prompts that require big commitments, and they’ve encouraged me to think about the incremental steps we take in our work to move them forward. 

The Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning is a central campus hub, “as we intentionally work to create partnerships and connect integrated networks and communities” across campus that underscore our commitment to meaningful teaching and learning activities (Kenny et al., 2025). The Program Innovation Hub is another central campus unit, and through its hub-and-spoke model, we’ve forged an important partnership that underscores the power of campus connections to enact meaningful change for our students and communities. 

The hub-and-spoke model hails from the 80s-era transportation industry (Viton, 1983) and has been adapted from there to improve efficiencies across regional, industrial, and entrepreneurial economies (Tolchin, et al., 2022; Mayer, 2013), in healthcare (Elrod & Fortenberry Jr., 2018), and even within university-industry partnerships (Compagnucci et al., 2025). The way it is enacted varies somewhat across industries, but fundamental to the model itself is its function as a “coordination mechanism”—organizing “nodes of innovation in a community” around a central hub (Compagnucci et al., 2025, p. 2). The PIH, as this central hub, builds and maintains connections with units across campus to ensure a flow of support and knowledge to and from the Hub to create meaningful, sustainable UCalgary programs that prepare students for both their future careers and meaningful community impact. 

The strong spoke between these central campus hubs has enabled the smooth flow of teaching and learning supports at the course, program, and faculty levels, and the translation of scholarly research in teaching, learning, and educational development into practical resources and consultations that aid in the development of future-focused university programs (Bens et al., 2020; Kalu & Dyjur, 2018). Though the hub-and-spoke model broadly emphasizes efficiency as a key advantage, we also see its benefits from the vantage point of these incremental, actionable steps to advance our institutional commitments, such as our goal to create and maintain “a safe, welcoming, equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible working, research, teaching, and learning and living environment” (University of Calgary, p. 7). 

The hub-and-spoke model enables the TI to bring its expertise in equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA), Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Universal Design for Learning, academic integrity, curriculum design and development, and more, to bear on program ideation, development, and implementation across UCalgary. It has led to the  PIH’s creation of recommendations for program proposal development that prioritize core commitments to EDIA and Indigenous Ways of Knowing, and funnelled important TI resources and expertise to campus units that encourage research-informed action. I share a few resources here, designed by scholarly experts in the TI, that take these big commitments and translate them into actionable steps forward for our community members: 

• Diversifying course content through an EDI perspective
• From Theory to Action: Practical Strategies for Designing Accessible, Diverse, and Inclusive Teaching and Learning
• Learning Module: Anti-Racism, EDI and Positionality in Teaching and Learning
• Learning Module: Universal Design for Learning

Grant & Kenny’s (2026) reflection on the possibility of a university education that builds skills for the workforce while also enabling meaningful and lifelong contributions to our broader communities asks us to consider what steps we take in our own work that helps us strike this balance. Forging strong connections between campus units that allow us to share our scholarly work and expertise is just one step we’re taking to do this. 

References:

Bens, S., Kolomitro, K., & Han, A. (2020). Curriculum development: Enabling and limiting factors. International Journal for Academic Development, 26(4), 481-485. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2020.1842744

Compagnucci, L., Spigarelli, F., Perugini, F., Iacobucci, D., & Cobis, F. (2025). Does the hub and spoke model matter for university-industry engagement in innovation ecosystems? The Journal of Technology Transfer, 1-32. 

Elrod, J. K. & J. L. Fortenberry Jr. (2017). The hub-and-spoke organization design: an avenue for serving patients well. BMC Health Services Research, 17, 1-38. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12913-017-2341-x

Grant, K., & Kenny, N. (2026). Learning for life: Reclaiming higher education’s fuller purpose. UCalgary News, https://news.ucalgary.ca/news/learning-life-reclaiming-higher-educations-fuller-purpose?mkt_tok=MTYxLU9MTi05OTAAAAGfOGG_r39hlNq6xIlpikKCP9xg1twhjWcV4jY5eegJQzd0S24fyikt0bvm5J8Ha_SKRpQSiLcTzHPNJlNIjkEaHnwcLovJPG2Qbj7d-nUaMds1tH0WOA

Kalu, F., & Dyjur, P. (2018). Creating a culture of continuous assessment to improve student learning through curriculum review. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2018(155), 47-54. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20302 

Mayer, H. (2013). Entrepreneurship in a hub-and-spoke industrial district: Firm survey evidence from Seattle’s technology industry. Regional Studies, 47(10), 1715-1733. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2013.806792

Tolchin, B., Bruce, L., Mercurio, M., & Latham, S. R. (2022). A hub and spoke model for improving access and standardizing ethics consultations across a large healthcare system. The American Journal of Bioethics, 22(4), 42-45. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2022.2044551

University of Calgary. (2023). Academic innovation plan. https://www.ucalgary.ca/live-uc-ucalgary-site/sites/default/files/teams/10/23-OPR-400878-Strat-Plan-Implementation-AcademicPlan-v10.0%5B8%5D.pdf

Viton, Philip A. (1983). A simple hub-and-spoke model of optimal international air transportation.” International Journal of Transport Economics, 10(3), 593-611. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42748006