CTE's Kyle Scholz is the coordinator of Waterloo's annual Teaching and Learning Conference. He fielded some questions posed by Mark Morton.
Kyle, the Teaching and Learning Conference is coming up before too long -- April 27 and 28. How many years has the conference been happening?
We’re in our thirteenth year now of running this conference. It started back in 2009 when it was originally known as “Opportunities and New Directions” with a more research-heavy focus, but over the years the name has changed, as has the focus, now being open to hearing faculty, instructors, staff, and students share not only research that they've conducted, but also practical and lived experiences as educators and learners.
Last year’s conference was of course fully online. What was it like pivoting to that format?
It was surprising how many things you don’t think about when a conference has to move to a new modality. We had originally intended last year’s conference to be held in April of 2020, but of course COVID at that time was dictating the rules and we had to postpone it until 2021. In the fall of 2020, when we began planning for the online iteration of this conference, we thought it would be simple since months of planning had already gone into the postponed conference. But as soon as you start investigating how to capture that “conference feel” in a virtual environment, you start to realize how much we rely on in-person conventions when we’re at a conference, and how many things need to shift to suit the online format. There are, though, many benefits that come with the online conference. We had more than 500 folks attend the conference (whereas we’re typically limited to 400 or so due to in-person space requirements), and we saw individuals from eight different countries and 59 different institutions. The lower price of registration made the conference more broadly accessible as well.
Is this year’s conference going to be fully online again – or will some of it be in person?
The conference itself will be fully online, yes. With the pandemic and COVID’s impact ever changing, we feel it's in everyone’s best interest to host it online yet again to ensure the conference is accessible to all of our colleagues at UW. With that said, we recognize that there are many who miss the in-person conference and the affordances that come with that. So, this year we're going to be hosting an in-person reception at the end of the second day of the conference (Thursday, April 28th) at Federation Hall. There’ll be food and drink, and we’ll keep the capacity capped so we can ensure there's sufficient space for everyone. Of course, should public health guidance change from now until the conference our plans will change as well. We don’t want anyone to feel like they have to attend if, come April, we’re in a state that makes gathering in-person unsafe. Furthermore, if you just want to attend the online conference, you won’t be missing out on anything by not attending the in-person reception. We’re viewing this as an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues who you might not have seen over the past two years and to chat more informally about teaching and learning.
What are some of the highlights of the conference that people can look forward to?
I think there are many! Let’s start with our keynote speaker, Dr. Alison Cook-Sather (Bryn Mawr College). With our conference theme being “Fostering Partnerships in Pedagogy”, she is a highly-regarded researcher and speaker on pedagogical partnerships, and we're sure to learn new ways of inspiring and encouraging partnerships between students, faculty, staff, and industry partners. The Igniting our Practice plenary session is also always a highlight, where two of our own instructors at the University of Waterloo share their teaching craft and teach us, as if we were their students. This year, Sean Geobey (School of Environment, Enterprise and Development) and Diana Skryzdlo (Statistics and Actuarial Science) will be our Igniting our Practice speakers, and we’re excited to see how they use the online learning environment to teach us. After what we learned last year hosting the online conference, we’re thinking of ways to improve upon that experience and find ways to keep attendees engaged throughout -- to interact, network, participate, and feel that your experience of the conference was everything you hoped it would be.