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2003 Annual Meeting

Teaching, Learning, Technology, and the New Academy
January 26–28, 2003
Hyatt Regency New Orleans
New Orleans, Louisiana

Proceedings

Meeting Theme and Purpose

Institutions of higher education are intersected by three major vectors of change:

  • Teaching: changes in what society's needs and perceptions are for education as a social good. What should we be teaching in this world reshaped by long-term international, economic, technological, and geopolitical forces?
  • Learning: changes in our understanding of how people think and learn, as well as students' needs for education and their perception of it as a private good. How should we change our teaching practice to reflect this understanding?
  • Technology: opportunities to teach and learn in new ways that new technologies bring. How do we go about making good and appropriate choices in our use of technology to support teaching and learning?

The economy is another significant driver of change. Institutions of higher education are pressured to decrease costs, deliver return on investment, and manage scarce resources effectively. The slumping economy and state budget shortfalls have led to surging tuitions (more than a 20-percent increase at some state universities), while the value of college investment portfolios has diminished by half or more. Even more troubling, research indicates that by the end of the decade in the United States, nearly four-and-a-half million college-qualified students will be unable to enroll in a four-year college, and another two million will be denied any access to college, due to the prohibitive cost of higher education.

Do we continue with business as usual, making incremental cuts and changes, in the hopes that these pressures will fade? Or is this an opportunity to demonstrate the remarkable creativity that has been an attribute of our community, and begin to design and build the new academy?

Faculty, instructional technologists, instructional designers, faculty support staff members, administrators: and yes, students: came to New Orleans to explore these topics at our annual meeting.

Meeting Organization and Key Themes

This meeting continued NLII's tradition of designing conferences and meetings that are as participatory and interactive as possible. We again offered featured sessions, covering key themes. This year, concurrent sessions were also organized by key theme.

2003 NLII key themes:

  • Electronic Portfolios
  • Faculty Engagement
  • Learner-Centered Design and Practices
  • Learning Materials, Tools and Markets
  • Learning Objects
  • Partnering in the Learning Marketspace
  • Readiness
  • Systemic Progress in Teaching and Learning
  • Strategic Planning and Alignment for Institutional Transformation
  • Transformative Assessment Systems
  • Virtual Communities

Virtual Communities of Practice

We also provided a new opportunity for participants to network with peers, both in person at the annual meeting and in virtual groups before and after the meeting, by offering four Virtual Communities of Practice organized around the following topics:

  • Electronic Portfolio Practices
  • Learning Objects
  • Teaching and Learning Virtual Community of Practice
  • The New Academy

These four pilots are part of the EDUCAUSE Virtual Communities Initiative

Pre-Meeting Preparations

To help participants get the most out of the conference, we offered supplemental readings to prepare them for the various presentations and to raise the level of discussion. We asked all speakers to recommend white papers, Web sites, articles, and other resources that were helpful to attendees with an interest in a particular topic. These can be found on the Pre-Meeting Preparations page.


 
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