Alan Drimmer, PhD, is Provost at National Defense University (NDU). Prior to joining NDU, Drimmer served as Chief Academic Officer and Senior Vice President of the University of Maryland Global Campus with over 90,000 students and 3,500 faculty. At Maryland, Drimmer had oversight of all academic programs, faculty affairs, curriculum development, the registrar, assessment, accreditation, academic technology innovation, student retention and support. He launched several new programs in cyber security, data analytics and cloud computing and also managed the development of competency-based learning curricula, open educational resources, and academic success metrics. He also developed non-credit professional development partnerships, corporate training relationships and apprenticeship programs working with MOOCs, edtech providers and the military.
Prior to Maryland, Drimmer was CEO of Chicago-based startup PromotED which linked employers and university partners to increase employee access to higher education and training, leading the movement to position “education as a benefit.” In previous roles, Drimmer served as Provost at the University of Phoenix where he led the restructuring of academic affairs built around a shared services model, the development of stackable credentials and a robust array of non-credit offerings. He was also president at Western International University and American InterContinental University.
Drimmer received his BA, MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a research fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs and won the Derek Bok Award in Undergraduate Teaching.