The University of Michigan’s 25th annual Enriching Scholarship conference May 1-2 will be conducted around the theme of “Taking the Lead — Dancing with Disruption in Higher Education,” highlighting a range of instructional tools and approaches that disrupt traditional teaching.
The conference is free for all members of the U-M community and is hosted by U-M’s Teaching and Technology Collaborative.
All sessions will take place virtually, except for an on-campus watch party at 2 p.m. May 1 in the Hatcher Graduate Library for the keynote address delivered by Cynthia Alby, professor of teacher education at Georgia College.
Over 25 years, the Enriching Scholarship conferences have hosted more than 1,400 workshop sessions offered by more than 500 presenters, with nearly 30,000 individual registrations.
Topics this year will cover various areas such as artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT in higher education), building resilience through effective pedagogy, future-thinking, data privacy, technology tools, and leveraging technology to meet the needs of a diverse student community.
Keynote speaker Alby’s primary research questions revolve around reimagining education and reenchanting learning, so both teachers and students can flourish.
She is a co-author of “Learning that matters: A field guide to course design for transformative education,” and wrote the article “ChatGPT: A Must-See Before the Semester Begins” for Faculty Focus. For more than 20 years, she has taught faculty within the “Governor’s Teaching Fellows Program” through the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
“Enriching Scholarship has consistently been a showcase and inspiration for teaching innovation over the years, giving U-M faculty and staff the chance to share their classroom successes and lessons across departments and schools,” said Emily Ravenwood, manager of Learning and Teaching Technology Consultation Services in LSA.
“This conference is an important opportunity to foreground the teaching mission of the university, and to come together after a year of teaching and learning to share insights with each other as one community.”
This year, for example, Mark Guzdial, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the College of Engineering, professor of information in the School of Information, and professor of education in the School of Education, will share from his research and teaching experience on how people learn computing as well as how to improve that learning, especially in fields that don’t often focus on computing.
His approach, adding “just a teaspoon” of computing to existing courses, has already resulted in several great modules and activities for other instructors to try including. He will present with Elizabeth Fomin, a senior instructional consultant in LSA, who has worked with him this year.
A poll in EDUCAUSE Review shows the necessity of the Teaching and Technology Collaborative facilitating change over the past 25 years. It concluded that “generative AI” technologies such as ChatGPT poses serious implications for ethics, equity and inclusion, accessibility, and data privacy and security.
“With such high stakes, institutional leaders are under pressure to make the right decisions, but as users quickly adopt generative AI for life and work, time is of the essence. The most productive immediate action stakeholders can take is to bridge institutional silos for focused discussion around the implications of generative AI for their communities,” wrote article authors Nicole Muscanell and Jenay Robert.
