ELI (Educause Learning Initiative) Annual Meeting was a great first in-person conference. It’s small enough to solidify connections with others, and large enough to always meet someone new. Everyone attending and presenting are like-minded higher education teaching and learning professionals who want to explore innovative tech and engage in thoughtful conversation. Below is a list of sessions I attended and wanted to share.

Wired for Connection: Promoting Our Collective Well-Being and Success

Presenter: Flower Darby (Associate Director of Teaching for Learning Center at University of Missouri)
Description: As social beings, we have a deep and fundamental need to be part of the group. When we feel like we belong, we are willing and able to cognitively engage, take intellectual risks, and learn more deeply and effectively. Explore how promoting connections and belonging, with and among students, fosters increased academic achievement, engagement, and persistence, all of which lead to better and more equitable learning outcomes in all class modalities. Identify evidence-based practical strategies to promote student and faculty well-being and success, and discover how these approaches support our own well-being and success.

Takeaways:
  • Buzz words:
    • Equity minded teaching
    • Collected Effervescence – synchrony felt by the opportunity to connect with others and be energized by the synergy experienced
    • Propinquity Effect – the tendency to form close relationships with others through repeated encounters
  • Results of pandemic trauma:
    • Constant exhaustion
    • Reduced empathy (ex. toilet paper hoarding)
    • Reduced civility (ex. gun violence, police brutality)
  • Feeling connected boosts well being, productivity, learning.
  • What to do to promote connectedness?
    1. Show up with compassion
    2. Show up with honesty
    3. Get to know people on a more personal level and let them get to know you
    4. Demonstrate caring: prioritize interactions, share failures – ‘CV of failures’ (schools rejected from, jobs I didn’t get, grants I didn’t receive)
  • References:
    • The Staff Are Note OK (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
    • Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less book by Leidy Klotz

Town Hall: Looking to the Future with the Educause Strategic Plan

Presenters: Helen Norris (Vice President & Chief Information Officer at Chapman University), Nicole McWhirter (Educause Chief Planning Officer), John O’Brien (Educause President & CEO)
Description: EDUCAUSE President and CEO John O’Brien, Board Chair Helen Norris, and Chief Planning Officer Nicole McWhirter discuss the association’s strategic planning process, focused on the EDUCAUSE commitment to a member-focused future. The town hall is meant to clarify and affirm the role EDUCAUSE plays and ensure that the mission and vision are relevant and responsive to the challenges in a post-pandemic world.

Takeaways:

  • In July 1998, Educause was created from the merge of Educom and CAUSE
  • 3-5 year plan
    • (Jan 2022) Planning approach: updated purpose and mission (change what was outdated/surpassed)
    • (July 2023): review goals, objectives, actions annually
  • Audience Wishlist:
    • Welcome kits for incoming members (new organization and/or new employees of a Higher Ed institution): Pathways Activities
    • Support for CIO’s to think and talk about Academics
    • Support for faculty in learning IT terms – campus governance
    • Digital Ethics Framework (addendum): standards and requirements for Educause corporate vendors
    • More International Panelists
  • Found resources:

Cal State XR: Collaboration, Innovation, and Creativity—Amazing Things Are Possible

Presenters: Kate Miffitt (Director for Innovation at California State University), Max Tsai (Digital Transformation and Innovation Officer at California State University, Fresno)
Description: Immersive technologies (AR/VR/XR) have long held promise in higher education for transforming how to teach, learn, and connect, but they have also faced obstacles to adoption due to access and affordability issues. In this session, presenters demonstrated how they’ve leveraged an open-source, device-agnostic XR platform (Mozilla Hubs and AWS cloud) and made it available at scale across universities in our system to make immersive environments available for teaching, virtual events, and other engagement activities.

Takeaways:

  • Goals:
    • Normalization of online/hybrid learning to increase the growth of different learning modalities
    • XR Sandbox: create a scalable, affordable solution to inaccessible opportunities in person
  • Challenges:
    • lack of pedagogical alignment
    • lack of faculty engagement
    • lack of funding/affordance of hardware and software
  • Ideas for XR Spaces:
    • Mock institutional spaces: works like VR chat, interactive space
    • Examples: campus tours, tech conferences, poster sessions, class spaces/labs, scavenger hunts, museum exhibits
  • Software used: Mozilla Hubs (not free)
    • VR Collab platform runs in browser and head-mount devices (Desktop, mobile, and headset)
    • Open source and customizable
  • What’s Next:
    • tutorial videos, demos, workshops, showcases
    • learning analytics: accessing reports of participation, engagement, and learning
    • AI Avatar in XR spaces

Preparing Departments and Instructors for the Flexible Future

Presenter: University of Massachusetts Amherst: Daniel Cannity (Instructional Design & Faculty Support Team Lead), Claire Hamilton (Associate Provost), Heather Sharpes-Smith (Executive Director of Online Educational Technology), Mei-Yau Shih (Associate Director of Center for Teaching)
Description: The Flexible Learning Fellows Program meets institutional goals for curriculum transformation by offering faculty sustained professional development in flexible learning course design and the leadership skills to expand flexible learning and teaching practices in their department. This session defined flexible teaching at the course and curriculum levels and shared strategies for starting similar departmentally centered faculty development structures.
Resource: Slide Presentation

Takeaways:

  • Name of program: UMass Amherst Flex – provide teaching in different modalities (In person, live online, asynchronous online)
  • Current curricula: experiential, lecture, studio, labs
  • How to encourage faculty?
    • Strength-based perspective lens – what have fac done during the height of pandemic
    • Discipline-specific support and faculty champions
    • Department funded – voluntary participation
  • 2 Phase structure
    • Participants (Fellows) as Instructors (Phase 1): demonstration (by support staff), experimentation (try it out), planning period
    • Fellows as Leaders (Phase 2): share (successes and failures), demonstration (by fellows), lead (faculty champions)
  • Biggest struggle of program: students connecting with other students

VR Meets AI Meets the Matrix: Using Embodied Conversational Agents for Experiential Learning

Presenter: California State University, San Bernardino: Yutong Liu (Instructional Technologist/XR Course Developer), Fadi Muheidat (Assistant Professor), Kristi Papailler (Assistant Professor), Wagner Prado Prado (Assistant Professor)
Description: Post-pandemic education can take advantage of the convergence of virtual reality, natural language processing, and motion captre technology to create scalable digital spaces where students can practice future interactions with patients or live audiences. Learn how California State University, San Bernardino uses embodied conversational agents (ECA) to create experiential learning in VR training simulations for nursing, kinesiology, and theatre while increasing students’ empathy and engagement.
Resource: Presentation Slides

Takeaways:

  • Why VR?
    • Authentic learning environment – quality of visual experience
    • Fun and safe space to fail
  • Current research: VR in nursing and chemistry
    • 3D multi perceptional modeling
    • Motion capturing (immersive avatar, animation)
    • Language controls: English with American or Chinese accent
  • VR Interface:
    • 3D images in a 2D screen; 3D space with spatial orientation (grabbing objects, movement, controllers)
    • Training and instruction within virtual space
    • AI-driven Dialogue: more authentic conversation; capability for non-English speakers (Mandarin)
  • Software used:
    • Language dev: Google text-to-speech (and speech-to-text), UE4 Plugin, Python script.
    • Character creation (timeline 3-4 moths): MetaHuman web based editor
    • Face tracking: live link face
    • Movement: recorded animation with Rokoko Suits, retargeting with MoCap systems
  • Challenges: motion sickness, user attention, understanding controls

All Together: Sharing Tech Tools, Teaching Resources, and Faculty Stories via an Interconnected Site

Presenter: Adam Maksl (Associate Professor of Journalism/Faculty Fellow for eLearning Design and Innovation at Indiana University Southeast)
Description: Teaching.IU.edu, a context-rich, well-organized repository centralizing teaching and EdTech resources across the multi-campus institution. Faculty have a self-serve site that connects tools to application possibilities and helping instructional tech consultants more efficiently share content with one another. This session shares the development process and how Teaching.IU is a foundation to provide faculty with personalized, just-in-time teaching development resources.
Resources: Presentation Slides, Website link

Takeaways:

  • Includes teaching resources and faculty stories via an interconnected website (formatted similar to online recipe book)
  • Fac stories include: step-by-step guide, evidence of effectiveness, inclusivity, adaptability
    • Submission from template
    • Peer-reviewed (but not mentioned by whom)
    • Do not mention tool installation and set up; more so pedagogical strategies of using a tool
  • Tools Guide includes: filtering options, short description, key features
    • privacy policy and accessibility when possible
  • Faculty Story Incentive:
    • Evidence for tenure
    • Demonstrate leadership in teaching with tech initiatives
  • Core website built in a WCMS (web content management system)
    • Tools and Stories live as a separate custom web application, built on a LAMP server stack with the Laravel PHP framework as the backend foundation

(My personal favorite) We Don’t Talk about Bruno: Lessons for Technology Leadership and Mental Health

Presenter: Allan Gyorke (Chief Academic Technology Officer at University of Miami), Hannah Inzko (Senior Director of Academic Technology at Wake Forest University)
Description: Disney’s Encanto tells the story of a family who uses their magical gifts to serve their community. What is seen below the surface is the family members struggling with unprocessed trauma, feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, unrealistic expectations, and rigid roles that have no room for self-care. Institutions have faced a variety of crises, and support teams are called upon time and again to use our special gifts. We save the day over and over, but with hidden costs.
Resources: Handout, Slide deck

Takeaways:

  • Great ice-breaker – find some commonality with peers
  • Suggested Enneagram test: 9 personality types
    • We are a bit of all, just higher in some more than others
    • Use this link for more info on results
    • (note: keep both links open in separate tabs/windows)
  • How to read results:
    • Personality type = highest ranking number
    • Wings = neighboring numbers (ex. Type 2, has 1 and 3 wings)
      • the higher ranking neighbor number is your wing
    • Lines connected your number = personality types you become in moments of Disintegration (stress) and Integration (growth)