The entire InTRO team headed up to Forest Grove last week for the Seventh International Conference on e-Learning and Innovative Pedagogies, sponsored by Common Ground Publishing and hosted by Pacific University. Pacific’s beautiful tree-filled campus was a wonderful setting for a couple of days of listening, conversing and thinking.

e-Learning and Innovative Pedagogies was a small, two-day conference (there were approximately 100 registered participants) with two plenary sessions, and a number of concurrent panel sessions. Panels were conducted in both English and Spanish. The conference brought together individuals from nearly thirty different countries, including significant contingents from Central and South American nations, and a number of presenters from Nigeria. In fact, the conference is specifically designed with a worldwide focus, bringing together up-and-coming academics from across the globe who might otherwise find themselves shut out of presentation opportunities. Common Ground Publishing runs over twenty topical conferences annually using this service-oriented model.

For a chronological overview of our time at the conference, please visit our Storify record; otherwise, continue reading below for some of our highlights!

A lot of the presentations we saw tried to tackle BIG questions:

And these were just a few. The major trends explored in panels and workshops included assessing student learning, mobile technologies, competency-based education, digital badges, and connected or collaborative learning. As you can see, this was a small conference thinking big. While this made for an experience that generally emphasized breadth more than depth, we managed to split up and see a wide variety of talks, giving us a lot of fodder for productive conversation on the trip back to Eugene and in the days since.

On Saturday morning the sessions were less formal. They included an interactive workshop run by the team behind UO’s own Food Arts Impact project, as well as a frank discussion of community-building strategies for online undergraduate courses, and a constructivist exercise on becoming aware of how spaces, physical or virtual, become a part of your learning:

This exercise, easily reproducible with different constituencies and different populations, was one of the most useful takeaways from the conference. It also generated greater self-awareness: for me, at least, much of how I learn is bound up in how I choose to relate to other people, more so than I ever realized.

After lunch on Saturday we decided we’d gotten enough out of the conference, and made our way back to Eugene–detouring briefly through delightful McMinnville, where we had dessert on the rooftop of the Hotel Oregon and discussed what we’d learned.

Check out that view!

Thanks to Academic Extension for supporting our travel, to Pacific University for hosting the conference, and to all of the presenters who shared their thoughts with us!