Last Chance!

A month ago I posted an invitation to help select the sessions for a virtual conference I have organized for the past 8 years. For next year's conference, I thought I'd add some people from outside our System to help select the sessions, to bring in some different perspectives. So far, I have two people who have volunteered to participate. I'd like to get one or two more. If you are interested, contact me via email at: rhails@passhe.edu. The original post, with the full explanation, is below.

Many of you know that for the past 8 years I’ve run a virtual conference every February. Transforming the Teaching & Learning Environment started as a free professional development opportunity for the faculty and staff at the 14 universities comprising our System. The first year consisted of 8 sessions and 40 participants. Since then, it’s grown to 60 one-hour sessions over the course of two weeks with several hundred participants. While the conference remains free for our faculty and staff, a few years ago we opened it up to anyone outside our System for a very modest fee.

Having organized conferences in the past, I recognized that if you do the standard call for presentations you never know what you’re going to get. Usually, the topics and quality are all over the spectrum. This conference, however, is different. We look at 20 or more conferences in the prior year and select sessions that we think best fit the theme of our conference. The conference committee starts with an initial pool of 200-300 sessions and goes through a couple of rounds rating them. The lowest rated sessions are eliminated each time. For the third and final round, faculty and staff within our System have the opportunity to rate the sessions. This usually results in a final pool of about 80-100 sessions. At that point, we start with the highest-rated sessions and reach out to the presenters and ask them to give their presentation again for our conference. In return, they won’t have to travel and we’ll give them free access to the conference. It’s a formula that has proven to be very successful.

The next evolutionary step is adding some outside input to the selection process. Maybe three or four people to participate in the session selection process around September and October. It’d involve spending time going through a list of sessions and descriptions in SurveyMonkey and choosing “Definitely”, “Maybe”, or “Don’t think so”. In return for your help, you will receive free access to the conference. If you are interested, contact me via email at: rhails@passhe.edu.