CSEdX: Maximising Student Success in a Post COVID world

Description

While the initial conference theme was decided my role involved chairing the program team to decide on the sub-themes that would connect to the experience of those invited to submit, establish what these meant in the context of education and organising the styles of presentation that we felt best offered opportunity for sharing of practice. Once submissions were in, I organised for peer reviewers for papers, symposiums and discussions, reviewed and arranged the abstracts into sets and created the program to hang together as a cohesive learning experience for participants.
So what? Teaching is complex and challenging in the current HE setting, with many different pressures on academics to engage students, provide high quality learning, muster constantly changing technologies to support learning and assess students with authentic tasks that showcase what they know and how they have developed. concepts that emerged for me from this event that speak to what teaching in higher education is today were:
the importance of Collaborative Teaching to provide shared input, emotional and collegial support and to best support students.
Teaching as problem solving - there are constant demands on teachers to come up with new ideas, new ways of providing inspiration and new ways of engaging students, while continuing to provide deep knowledge and to transform learners into producers of knowledge rather than consumers.
Learning is becoming commodified, so that students, as clients, want an outcome the aligns with the cost of the course, that comes easily and is 'fun'.
Teaching is hard, teaching well is very hard. We have some really inventive, creative teachers at CS and showcasing their work was a real celebration of this. The work of developing capabilities of teaching needs to showcase the good and support the less capable to understand the connection between effective teaching and engaged students.
What now? The conference has provided a number of jumping off points, and connections to build an effective and inspiring program of professional learning in 2021. We need to capture where excellence is happening, and design programs that create attainable strategies to help all academics to be excited by teaching.

Period	2020
Event title	2020 Charles Sturt EdX Learning and Teaching Conference: Maximising Student Success in a Post-COVID World
Event type	Conference
Location	Bathurst, Australia, New South WalesShow on map