Thank you for your interest in the ELI Annual Meeting! This event is a gathering for everyone working in post-secondary teaching, learning, and student success. This diverse community affords opportunities for rich conversations, valuable networking, and the chance to spawn new initiatives and collaborations. It’s also the opportunity to present your work, discoveries, and insights, as well as your tools with your colleagues for the benefit of the entire community. We welcome your submission! Please read the text of the call for proposals carefully before you begin work on your proposal.
Event themes for 2020
Empowering Learners and Instructors: Transformational Practices and Technologies
The core idea of empowerment is the building of skills and confidence. In light of significant demographic and technology changes, the task of empowering learners and instructors has become more important as well as more complex. Technologies, when paired with best and transformational practices, offer us myriad possibilities for successfully navigating the complexities, discovering new opportunities, and advancing equity through inclusion. Join your colleagues to engage in discussions around the key issues and opportunities for post-secondary teaching, learning, and student success. We encourage you to help lead that discussion and set new directions by contributing the discoveries you are making at your campus. Together we'll explore these and other questions:
- What new kinds of leadership are required for this new teaching and learning landscape?
- What are the best methods and techniques that promote innovation and creative thinking to support student learning?
- What new educational technologies seem most promising?
- What role should data and analytics play, and what are the trade-offs between analytics and privacy?
- How can we best determine the efficacy of our learning innovations and technologies?
- What learning spaces and environments best promote active learning?
2020 Annual Meeting Tracks
Promoting the teaching, learning, and student success mission is a complex enterprise, calling for the careful interweaving of a variety of aspects and dimensions. The thematic tracks for the 2020 Annual Meeting cover this wide spectrum. Proposals that clearly describe innovative and creative work will receive the highest priority in the selection process.
- Analytics:
Privacy, learning data, student advising, interventions, and course and learning success - Designing for Learning:
Instructional design, learning design, learning engineering, and learning science - Digital & Information Literacy:
Digital literacies (e.g., data, information, visual, media); interpretive and evaluative competencies; information and technology skills; communication skills; building citizenship competencies - Evidence of Impact:
What works: learning research, evidence-based practice, seeking evidence of impact, evaluation tools, frameworks, and techniques - Inclusivity & Accessibility:
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) - Leading Academic Transformation:
Culture, institutional strategy, cross-organizational collaboration, and change management and leadership - Learning Horizons:
Emerging technology, mixed reality and AI applications, ground-breaking practices, and educational futures - Open Education:
Inclusive access, content, educational designs and practices, and policies, cost containment - Spaces for Learning:
Learning spaces, high-impact experiences, and next-generation digital learning environments (NGDLEs) - Student Success:
Student-centered practices, partnerships, and technologies that support equity in experience and outcomes - Teaching for Learning:
New approaches in faculty engagement and development, tools, frameworks, and team-based faculty support
Learning Objectives and Participant Engagement Strategies
Clear learning objectives and creative engagement strategies are essential components of every session. The ELI proposal reviewers will closely examine and rate each proposed session's learning objectives, which should clearly describe what participants will know or be able to do as a result of participating in the session. A successful proposal must also include the specific and creative ways in which the presenter(s) will engage with participants through active learning strategies. ELI encourages innovative and participatory session design, the creative use of technology, and active engagement by all participants.
Session Types
All ELI Annual Meeting sessions will be conducted face-to-face in the meeting venue.
Preconference Workshops
All preconference workshops will be held Monday, March 2, from 8:00 to 11:00 a.m. (PT). Up to two facilitators from each workshop will be provided with a full complimentary registration to the annual meeting. Workshop organizers are welcome to include additional facilitators; however, they will not be eligible for complimentary registration. Preconference workshops are intended to provide attendees with in-depth, hands-on learning experiences that will assist them in addressing their needs and opportunities to pursue their strategic and tactical goals.
Present and Engage Sessions
Please note that your presentation session proposal will be carefully evaluated and may be accepted for any of the following formats below, depending on the scope of content and engagement strategies proposed. When you submit your proposal, you will be asked to recommend that your proposal be included in one of the following three categories. All present and engage sessions are 45 minutes in length.
- Interactive Presentations: Interactive presentations are opportunities to present in detail on a project, idea, or result accompanied by meaningful audience participation. These sessions require continuous engagement tactics, interspersed activity tactics, or intensive Q&A tactics. At least 15 minutes of the session’s total time should be interactive. Proposal authors are encouraged to include an agenda with timings in their session description.
- Presentation Pairs: Presentation pairs include two 15-minute presentations (by different presenters), followed by a 15-minute question/discussion period, for a total of 45 minutes. This is a great way to organize closely related content with two unique perspectives. When you submit your proposal, you can suggest that your solo presentation be paired by the annual meeting program team or you can coordinate with colleagues to suggest your paired team. Final pairings will be determined by ELI, based on proposal content. These highly visible sessions highlight pioneering practices by giving institutions a spotlighted venue with condensed presentation time. Please note these are not poster sessions.
- Hands-On Workshop: Participants experience technology or pedagogical practices firsthand in these 45-minute sessions. These are not presentation sessions but rather activity sessions. Session descriptions should clearly indicate how presenters will guide a hands-on, tutorial-like experience using applications and resources. Participants can be asked to bring a mobile device (e.g., smartphone, tablet, laptop) to the session in order to fully participate and to experience an emerging, innovative technology or practice. Hands-on workshops, by virtue of their robust interactive learning design, will have priority consideration for the active learning space (designed by Steelcase Education). Presenters are responsible for providing any additional technologies needed to ensure an engaging hands-on experience.
Discuss and Connect Sessions
- Discussion Circle: This is ELI’s version of an unstructured, topic-driven discussion, somewhat like a conceptual jam session. The discussion circle is a way to engage with colleagues seeking common solutions to significant challenges in teaching, learning, and student success. Eschewing any presentation, discussion circle hosts facilitate conversations in small, intimate settings, allowing participants to take a deep dive into a pressing issue the community is tackling and for which the resolution is not obvious. These 45-minute sessions are entirely interactive and provide a unique “lifelong learning with lifelong friends” opportunity for attendees.
- Posters: Posters give participants and presenters the opportunity to share and examine problems, issues, and solutions in a more casual, personal environment through informal, interactive, brief presentations focused on effective practices, research findings, or technical solutions. The standard poster setup includes a 6' skirted table, wireless internet access, and boards. Posters are allocated 45 minutes of action time, with ample time for setup and breakdown.
- Mixed reality (XR) hands-on demonstrations: As we did last year, we invite community members working on curriculum-related XR projects to provide interactive “don the goggles” demonstrations of their work in these poster-like sessions. Facilitators will be assigned a location and time for their demonstration. Facilitators are expected to provide their own XR equipment to allow attendees to try out their application. Typical XR projects could include anything related to virtual reality, augmented reality, or mixed reality and can be supported by a range of technology, from high-end headsets to mobile devices. Wireless connectivity and adequate electrical power will be provided.
Corporate Participation
Researchers with corporate affiliation are welcome to submit proposals, either on their own or in collaboration with campus partners. These proposals must clearly explain how the presentation will report on objective, product-independent research and insights. The presentation's subject must be of wide and general interest to the teaching and learning community, independent of any local vendor relationships and marketing interests. The proposal must make clear how the session demonstrates thought leadership, addressing key challenges and themes universal to innovation in teaching and learning, without reference to specific products or services.
Students and Scholarships
The ELI welcomes and encourages including the student voice in the annual meeting sessions. In support of that, the ELI will provide complimentary registration for up to two full-time undergraduate or graduate student presenters per session. The EDUCAUSE ScholarshipsTM program is an extension of our commitment to those who lead, manage, and use information technology to shape strategic IT decisions at every level within higher education. Financial assistance is available to help with professional development. Click here to see if you are eligible for EDUCAUSE Scholarships.