TheValue Of Inquiry Into Student Learning In The 21st Century, Spring Conference, April 18-19, 2013.

Just over a week ago I was fortunate to attend the UW Systems Office of Professional and Instructional Development (OPID) Spring Conference at the Concourse Hotel in Madison, WI.  I had actually never heard of this office or conference before, but it was advertised through our academic and counseling network listserve and a colleague specifically recommended I go.

On their website, OPID explains that it “serves as a statewide faculty development resource for University of Wisconsin System institutions.  Established in 1977 as the Undergraduate Teaching Improvement Council, it was first led by a council of campus representatives who focused primarily on teaching improvement.  Over the past few years OPID has expanded its emphases to meet the broader professional needs of faculty and academic staff with programming on topics such as student learning, the scholarship of teaching and learning, career stages, and faculty roles and rewards.  OPID’s Council remains essential to its operation, both as an advisory board and as a liaison between System and its campuses.”

The attendees at this conference were a really interesting mix.  The entire conference was very instruction-heavy, which never bothers me as it is one of my personal interests, even if it doesn’t apply to my current position.  It makes sense anyway, given the history of the Office as described in the paragraph above.  There were instructors and other academic staff from all over the state, and while it was interesting to meet many of these folks, what was most advantageous to me was the opportunity to meet people from my own campus with whom I don’t readily find opportunities to engage.  One example includes the folks at UWM who offer training in Blackboard Collaborate, a tool I’ve been trying to gain access to for almost six months.  I attended one session in which they were presenting, re-introduced myself from previous emails, and got them to agree to give SOIS advisors a private tutorial session!  Win!

It was really encouraging to find so many presentations on online & blended learning at this conference.  I even attended a session on ePortfolios in which the advisors up at Stevens Point instruct a credit class at the beginning of a student’s major, and help them gather artifacts including resumes, job postings, reflections on their coursework, etc.  This was an idea that originally came from a WACADA conference, and this presenter adapted it to meet her own students’ needs.  I invited her to propose her presentation at this Fall’s WACADA conference, hosted by UWM, and the planning committee for which I just so happen to be currently serving.

The posters were ok, it might be a good idea to propose something in the future, although I definitely think the SOIS digital advising team should propose a regular program with the presentation we’ve been making the advising circuit with, #DigitalAdvising @YourSchool!.  I think it would be a good fit, and we can help represent more non-teaching academic staff interests at this seemingly very instruction-heavy conference.

One concept that kept coming up during this conference was the acronym “SoTL.”  “As described in Wikipedia, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is a growing movement in post-secondary education. SoTL is scholarly inquiry into student learning which advances the practice of teaching by making research findings public … SoTL necessarily builds on many past traditions in higher education … [and] research methods in SoTL include reflection and analysis, interviews and focus groups, questionnaires and surveys, content analysis of text, secondary analysis of existing data, quasi-experiments (comparison of two sections of the same course), observational research, and case studies, among others.  As with all scholarly study, evidence depends not only upon the research method chosen but the relevant disciplinary standards.  Dissemination for impact among scholarly teachers may be local within the academic department, college or university, or may be in published, peer-reviewed form. A few journals exclusively publish SOTL research, and numerous disciplinary publications disseminate such research…”

I am intrigued and eager to learn more about SoTL.  Perhaps later, with all the free-time I have, I’ll do some more research and write a dedicated blog post.  Better yet, I’d love to find another conference presentation sometime solely about SoTL.  I’ll have to keep my eyes open.