Another awesome eLCC conference

Combine top notch sessions, noteworthy keynotes, great networking, and an amazing conference venue and what do you get. The 2016 eLCC Annual Conference. The weather was perfect (at least until Friday afternoon) at Beaver Run Resort in Breckenridge, the unofficial home to eLCC's annual conference. For this year, my session focus was on the support of faculty in developing and delivering online course materials.

The University of Denver continues doing amazing things with their faculty development efforts. Molly Smith and Chelsie Ruge spoke on DU's efforts for developing baseline faculty expectations. Using buy-in from an associate dean and others, their task force developed a set of goals that were simple, measurable, and backed up with both rationale and resources. This has led to expectations for their faculty that include the completion of new faculty orientation, familiarization with the faculty handbook, a posting of the syllabus, and the posting of an introductory video, all before the start of classes.

Molly and Chelsie also spoke on creation of a faculty resource portal at DU that provides links to a wide assortment of information relevant to faculty life. Information resources included dates, policies, contacts, best practices, tech resources, trainings, events, and so forth. Their portal reminded me of a more user friendly 411 RHCHP page, available on their Academic Dean's INsite page INsite login required).

Keynotes were okay. Susan Zvacek advocated for a healthy degree of skepticism when reading articles (certainly an uncomfortable 45 minutes for Marc Prensky fans). Thursday's keynote, Anders Gronstedt, spoke highly of technologies that are effective but were financially out of reach to the vast majority of audience members. There's no doubt that high-end sims are effective training tools but to convince a budget-strapped budget committee of their worth is another matter.

Perhaps the highlight of the conference from a personal perspective was the awarding of the eLCC Technology Support Person of the Year award to Alex Benedict, ID&T's senior instructional technologist. Certainly a much deserved honor, and congrats to Alex for this recognition.

Another amazing eLCC annual conference. Hats off to Karen Kaemmerling and Paul Novak, eLCC co-chairs, and Kim Larson-Cooney, conference chair, for another awesome conference experience.