List of Conferences

Making Academic Change Happen  MACH is an experience, a philosophy, and an approach. Most simply, MACH is a three day workshop during which change agents learn the skills they need to implement changes on their campuses. This approach harnesses the lessons of the research literature in institutional change and translates them into actionable skills any faculty member can learn and utilize.

The three-day conference is packed with learning opportunities designed to enrich your teaching practice. There are preconference workshops that provide hands-on learning, plenary sessions keynoted by nationally-recognized experts, carefully selected concurrent sessions on a range of relevant topics, poster presentations highlighting the latest research, and all sorts of occasions for informal interaction.

Opportunity or Burden? The Department Chair's Role in Leading Academic Change "The department chair position is the most critical role in the university...80% of university decisions are made at the department level...yet only 3 percent of chairs receive training in leadership." (Gmelch and Miskin, Department Chair Leadership Skills, 2011) This meeting will bring together both new and veteran department and division chairs for a two-day workshop designed to address some of the most pressing challenges facing the Department Chair.

In distance education, keeping up means staying far ahead. At the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference you will discover innovative ways to teach and support online learners. Choose from more than 140 sessions to build the skills you need and learn best strategies, practices, and solutions. Connect with experts in online education and engage with eLearning colleagues from around the world.

"This retreat is for faculty in higher education. It is based on the philosophy that well facilitated shoptalk is one of the highest forms of professional development. No individual "expert" can match the collective knowledge, experience, wisdom, creativity, and genius of 30-40 teachers who are actively involved in their profession. The participants themselves are the experts at the retreat! You will meet with other teachers from different disciplines and institutions, engage in highly interactive discussions, share successful teaching strategies and innovations, seek solutions to your own teaching problems and challenges, and much more (see instructions for Prior Preparation about what to bring to the retreat). The retreat facilitators will provide structure and guidelines to help assure effective use of retreat time, but you and the other participants will decide which issues are most important and relevant to discuss. Together, we will pursue a quest for the ideal of the "great teacher." The Red Rock Great Teaching Retreat is based on the seminar model of the National Great Teachers Movement, founded in 1969 by David Gottshall. This movement continues to grow with workshops, retreats, and seminars held across the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world."

This workshop will give college teachers from any campus the opportunity to learn about these ideas, apply them to one of their own courses, and receive feedback on their new course design. This is a "Doing" workshop, NOT a "talking heads" seminar. Participants will spend over 50% of the workshop time "doing" course design: re-designing their courses, sharing their design with others, and getting feedback on their design.

This International Summer Institute is one of the first to be held on the topic of 'students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education'. It has several key features which make it distinctive: Key features The overall aim of the International Summer Institute is to build the capacity and understanding of faculty, staff and students to develop, design and implement initiatives to promote the practice of students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. Faculty, staff and students in higher education are invited to come to McMaster University, about 45 minutes south of Toronto International Airport, for two, three or four days from 2-5 May 2016. Faculty and staff are encouraged where possible to bring a student with them, or students should bring a member of faculty/staff with them, to participate in either one or two consecutive two day highly interactive workshops. Alternatively teams of 4-6 faculty/staff and students (at least two of each) from an institution may apply to join a three day 'Change Institute' where they will be supported to plan the implementation of a Students as Partners initiative. Inter-institutional teams are also welcome. The Summer Institute will be facilitated by highly experienced faculty, staff and students including Peter Felten (Elon, US), Mick Healey (Healey HE Consultants, UK), Beth Marquis (McMaster, Canada) and Kelly Matthews (Queensland, Australia) The McMaster International Summer Institute has students threaded throughout every aspect of the work - from the planning to the facilitating to the participating teams.

The Master Online Teacher (MOT) certificate The MOT is a comprehensive faculty development program utilizing the MVCR series. This program certifies participants who achieve a demonstrated knowledge related to online course design, online instruction, and other issues related to online teaching and learning. These competencies make a master online teacher.

The Teaching Professor Technology Conference will examine the technologies that are changing the way teachers teach and students learn while giving special emphasis to the pedagogically effective ways you can harness these new technologies in your courses and on your campus. The three-day conference will bring together faculty, instructional designers, faculty developers, educational technology leaders, and other higher education professionals interested in learning more about how technology is altering the learning environment.

The Certificate in Blended and Online teaching is made up of 11 blended and online modules, which can be completed as a whole or as stand-alone resources. The modules contain facilitator guides for online or face-to-face instruction, PowerPoint slides for face-to-face instruction, videos, handouts and SCORM packages.

The Open Education Global Conference is the annual opportunity for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and educators to deeply explore open education and its impact on global education. Conference participants will hear from thought leaders in open education and have the opportunity to share ideas, practices and discuss issues important to the future of education worldwide.  Sessions cover new developments in open education, research results, innovative technology, policy development and implementation, and practical solutions to challenges facing education around the world. The theme for Open Education Global 2015 is Entrepreneurship and Innovation, emphasizing the exciting directions and developments in open education around the world.

Moving Beyond "One-Size-Fits-All" by Targeting Three Strategic and Transformative Approaches: Evidence-Based Learning; Personalized Learning and Holistic Outcomes Assessment

The 2015 National Forum on Active Learning Classrooms (NF-ALC) at the University of Minnesota focuses on advancing practice and research on active learning classroom spaces. The NF-ALC will feature new session formats (see the Submission Guidelines) designed to provide opportunities for participants to demonstrate innovative practices and research that leverage the advantages of technology-enhanced learning spaces and active learning pedagogies. Our expectation is that participants from a wide variety of institutions will attend the NF-ALC to a) examine common issues affecting the effective use of these spaces and chart a path for their resolution; b) share successful practices that have enriched the student and faculty experience in active learning classrooms; and c) build and deepen networks with colleagues in order to advance their campus efforts. The forum is framed by the alignment between the use of new learning spaces and achieving the academic priorities of many universities and colleges, such as increased retention, improved graduation rates, student engagement, emerging technologies, and global learning. Since these priorities are of broad interest to all working in higher education, international participation is most welcome.

This year's conference theme is Leverage. This theme invites us to explore the various roles that we play as faculty developers, administrators, teachers, and students, and the ways in which we capitalize on the assets around us to meet the many needs of the higher education community, ideally doing more and better work with less effort. We hope this theme and conference will build on Kathryn Plank's 2013 Presidential Address, during which we all contemplated who we are and our relationship to the meaningful work that we do. In that spirit, how do we leverage who we are to better accomplish all that we are asked to do, and why do we persevere?

Keynote speakers Dr. Tony Bates and Dr. Alec Couros

The Centers for Teaching & Technology will host the 8th annual "The SoTL Commons" conference in Savannah, Georgia. The conference brings together people engaging in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and research that helps improve student learning outcomes in higher education. The conference epitomizes that college teaching is intellectual work that is enhanced both by disciplinary scholarship and the scholarship on teaching the disciplines (SoTL) that is enhanced by both disciplinary scholarship and the scholarship of teaching and learning. The SoTL Commons Conference is a catalyst for learning, conversations and collaborations about SoTL as a key, evidence-based way to improve student learning.

The Higher Education Summit explores the major issues of the day and the challenges facing educators, governments, business leaders and others. This year's conference takes place Nov. 23 and 24 at the Fairmont Royal York hotel in Toronto.

Faculty, staff, and administrators throughout higher education are employing contemplative practices for many reasons. These include sharpening attention; creating environments that enhance the well-being of all; addressing inclusion and access for all in support of the vibrant diversity of our institutions; deepening engagement and learning of subject matter; reflecting on and supporting meaning-making; considering the wider impacts of our actions; and ultimately supporting the development of a more just and compassionate society. Given the breadth and depth of these many intentions, the types of practices used are extremely diverse, and their assessment needs to be approached with great sensitivity. Assessment of practices designed to develop attention, for example, will be different from assessment of those practices designed to increase conceptual understanding or develop compassion and creativity.

The role of the educator is key to fostering learning experiences that support and sustain the development of lifelong learners and leaders in our society. At the 2015 STLHE conference, Achieving Harmony: Tuning into Practice, we will investigate the diversity of issues converging in higher education while acknowledging that the dissonance we can encounter in our work as educators is an opportunity to create transformative learning experiences for us and our students. We invite our higher education colleagues to Canada's West Coast to share their experiences and engage in scholarly inquiry into student learning to enable us to "fine-tune" our practice as educators, educational developers and educational leaders.