I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado from November 5th to 9th, 2012. For those who are unfamiliar with EDUCAUSE, they are: “a nonprofit association and the foremost community of IT leaders and professionals committed to advancing higher education”. This year I attended several interesting sessions on iPads, learning analytics, and effective online assessment. Here are some of the conference highlights that are most useful to teaching faculty in my department.

Note: I’m going to post several links below which might require registration for an EDUCAUSE account in order to view. Registration is free for most and definitely free for UO affiliates.

Poster sessions

I presented a poster session about the pedagogical benefits of video-recorded assessment and it was a great opportunity to not only discuss, but glean resource ideas from technologically-savvy conference participants who work in higher education. My session was only an hour long and I only wish I could have spent more time interacting and sharing ideas with participants. There were some other poster sessions that I found to be very interesting and potentially relevant in the context of higher education.  You can view most of those posters as well as my own by clicking on this link: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/poster-gallery

Webcasts

Several of the sessions were recorded and will be available to view for the next 90 days or so. You can login to EDUCAUSE and view them here: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/E12-private-recordings

One of my favorite sessions that was geared towards teaching and learning was Effective Online Assessment: Scalable Success Strategies. You can view that session here: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2012/effective-online-assessment-scalable-success-strategies

2013 Annual Conference Call for Proposals

If you are an ed tech enthusiast/nerd like me and you’d like to share your ideas about how to effectively use technology in your teaching, I highly recommend attending this conference. In both years that I have attended, have been very impressed with the level of organization, communication, and professionalism put forth by the conference organizers. The 2013 conference will be held in Anaheim, CA in mid-October and the deadline for conference proposals is: February 4, 2013. For more information or to submit a proposal, here is a link to their website: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference

If you have any questions about EDUCAUSE, feel free to comment on this post or email me for more information. EDUCAUSE is a great professional organization to be involved with if you are interested in technology in higher education. The UO is well-represented with IT leaders at these conferences and it would be great to see more UO teaching faculty represented too!