Programs and Tracks

Institutions are under pressure to innovate to address the wicked problems facing higher education: rising costs, demographic shifts, and the need to increase student success and measure outcomes. And yet, institutions, steeped in tradition and complex governance structures, often struggle to build change-ready cultures willing to take risks and experiment. What values and strategies inspire innovation at all levels of an institution? What skills, competencies, and frameworks enable organizations to successfully navigate and implement change? What innovative projects, pilots, and initiatives are moving your organization forward? How do IT units balance researching emerging technologies with keeping the lights on? Sessions in this track can include leadership and management strategies and efforts to cultivate innovation, processes and practices that support change efforts, and emerging projects and pilots that explore how innovation can support student success.

Data is everywhere. It's being produced by everything and being used to make many different kinds of meaning. Whether we are using data to inform decision-making or to identify what decisions we might want to make, we are challenged to collect, define, analyze, and present data that is larger and more diverse than ever before. How might we imagine solutions that involve connecting people and systems to trusted data and data processes in useful, accessible, and understandable formats? How might we create and share clear and compelling reports and data visualizations that demonstrate data's value to all our constituents, organization wide? This track will explore data's potential. We invite you to share what works for you. Topics include, but are not limited to, the people (organization, leadership, grassroots, literacy), processes (policy, governance, assessment, strategic planning, collaboration), and technologies (infrastructure, analytics, visualization, collaboration/sharing) that can help us find answers to these inquiries and more. Delivering trusted insights requires an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach spanning IT, research, and academic units—what should we know?

Cyberinfrastructure, both physical and human, is increasingly required across disciplines to enable groundbreaking research and scholarship in the digital age. Whether it's high-performance and high-throughput computing, massive storage capacity, hybrid and federated cloud resources, software-defined networks, rich media analysis, AR/VR/XR, or electronic lab notebooks, IT is a key partner in researcher success. Topics will include strategies for developing and sustaining robust research infrastructure, research computing facilitation and support, multi-institutional research infrastructure collaborations, IT and library research support collaborations, research data management, funding models, and creating research-enabling systems that foster best practices and reduce administrative burden.

How do institutional IT processes and practices enable and empower the core academic mission of teaching, learning, research, and scholarship? Additionally, what must we improve to see teaching and learning projects thrive with interdisciplinary, collaborative projects, products, and initiatives? This track invites presentations from a range of topics including instructional design, digital learning, learning space design, research computing, online and blended learning, accessibility and universal design, and mobile learning, as well as support for libraries, pedagogical research, and scholarship.

The relevancy of information technology depends on meeting emerging needs and innovations. Silos are being dismantled, and hybrid and matrixed teams are being formed to proactively solve problems and innovate. As higher education institutions morph to handle a changing world, IT can lead the way by leveraging people, process, and technology. IT leadership must ensure that the technology organization's resources and efforts are strategically aligned with the institution's vision and goals and that the institution is fully leveraging technology and talent to achieve its goals. This track focuses on how IT organizations socialize transformations that enable IT to lead innovation in the institution and on the critical role that IT plays in serving the needs of the entire institution—administrative, teaching and learning, and research. Topics include creating a modern workforce; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); performance effectiveness; cost control; mergers, closures, and consortiums; collaborative initiatives related to strategic institutional, vendor, and research partnerships; process transformations; culture change; making IT more effective; measuring the journey to excellence; remote campus relationships; and community engagement partnerships.

The practices of IT service delivery and digital transformation—increasingly important to realizing institutional strategy—rely on the successful convergence of information systems, cloud computing infrastructure, and a support-and-skills model that makes it all work across the breadth of a higher education institution (not just central IT). Modernizing infrastructures can increase agility and flexibility, bolster data protection, and encourage innovation. Topics in this track include infrastructure services and enterprise architecture/systems, as well as frameworks and strategies for effective, efficient IT service management including agile, DevOps, and ITIL.

Security, privacy, and ethics continue to be top-of-mind initiatives at each of our organizations. With the pace of change continuing to pick up speed and the focus on privacy and security at the start rather than as an afterthought, we are seeking proposals focused on strategic themes as well as highly technical and tactical talks. Proactive initiatives to protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks, breach response events, and more are all welcomed. This track also includes topics related to external partnerships, accessibility, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Technology has the potential to reduce friction for students, whether it's by nudging them to register for classes, pointing them to available parking spots, or making Wi-Fi access ubiquitous across campus. The digital student experience affects learners across the life cycle with the institution, shaping how they are recruited, educated, retained, and engaged. What are the design principles and approaches that should inform the digital student experience? How is technology reshaping the student experience to reduce friction and remove barriers? What emerging technologies have the potential to improve the student experience, and what are the risks and tradeoffs? This track will explore the ways in which higher education has successfully responded to the changing expectations of learners, families, and alumni.