We are excited to announce our annual Learning and Educational Center (LEC) Teaching and Learning Conference scheduled Wednesday, November 1 and Thursday, November 2 (virtual via Zoom).
The theme, Destination Excellence: A Journey to Engaged Teaching and Learning, represents NSU’s collective ambition to create an educational environment that nurtures critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. It recognizes that excellence is not a stagnant endpoint but an ongoing journey, requiring continuous improvement and adaptation.
The target audience includes all NSU faculty, staff, administrators, and students who play a role in educating our students (both through curricular and co-curricular courses).
We invite all NSU employees (faculty, administration, staff) to submit a proposal that embraces the conference theme with a particular focus in one of the following five LEC Educator Competency Framework categories and two special topic areas:
Competency Categories
1. Acting with Integrity: Sessions that focus on knowledge, skills, and attitudes relating to the development of honest, fair and consistent instructional practices that encourage freedom of inquiry. Examples: academic integrity and ethical conduct; designing fair assessments; developing effective policies, practices, and honor codes; supporting academic freedom and freedom of expression; promoting effective leadership strategies; ethics in teaching research.
2. Embracing Belonging, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: Sessions that focus on knowledge, skills, and attitudes relating to the design and delivery of learning opportunities that acknowledge, celebrate, and engage learners. Examples: culturally
responsive pedagogy, personalized learning; active and experiential learning; Universal Design; centering equity, inclusion, and social justice; implicit bias; inclusive instructional practices; fostering a culture of belonging.
3. Creating Learner-Centered Environments: Sessions that focus on knowledge, skills, and attitudes relating to creating environments that meet learners’ needs and maximize their academic success and professional development. Examples: creating learner-centered instruction; creating authentic classroom activities; effective classroom management; creating relationship-rich education; .supporting learners through mentoring and advising; fostering career readiness.
4. Designing Effective Learning Experiences: Sessions that focus on the design of effective learning experiences that support learner success. Examples: learning outcomes and course design; active learning strategies; feedback and assessment for learning; designing for online, web-enhanced, and blended learning; experiential learning design; evidence-informed course design, quality and continuous improvement; designing quality courses.
5. Using Innovative Teaching Strategies and Technology: Sessions that focus on knowledge, skills, and attitudes relating to employing innovative teaching strategies and appropriate technology that support quality teaching and learning. Examples: effective simulation design and implementation, gamification, adaptive and personalized learning; tech tools that support the teaching and learning process; creative uses of technology to support teaching and learning; ethical issues for instructional technology use; emerging educational technologies.
Special Topic Areas
6. Mental Health and Wellbeing: Sessions that focus on mental health and wellbeing for our NSU community (students, faculty, staff, administration). Examples: building resilience and well-being; self-care for educators; stress management for students; mental health and well-being support services; humanization of learning and centering student care; strategies for student retention and success.
7. Artificial Intelligence: Sessions that focus on how artificial intelligence can be used for teaching and learning. Examples: application of ChatGPT and other AI generators; plagiarism detection; transcription; chatbots; adaptive learning; learning analytics; intelligent tutoring systems; intelligent content generation; automated assessment and feedback; ethical considerations in AI for education.
Proposals will be reviewed based on the following four criteria:
1. Clarity: Do the title and abstract clearly describe the session? Is the abstract well-written? Is it clear what the session will be like for attendees?
2. Relevance: Is the content relevant to this year’s theme? Will this session make a positive contribution to the conference?
3. Outcomes: Are the session outcomes clear? Is there something compelling about this topic that would attract the audience and benefit the overall conference?
4. Interactivity: For workshops and concurrent sessions, is at least one-third of the session designed to engage the audience? Does the presenter note how this session will involve those who attend?
Presentations can have a focus on information related to research, scholarship, applications, and practice. All sessions will be presented via Zoom. Formats include the following:
Once the program schedule has been finalized, changes cannot be made. While situations may arise that might cause a presenter to cancel their presentation, we encourage you to seek every possible alternative, including finding a substitute or co-presenter, prior to deciding to withdraw from the conference.
The following individuals comprise this year’s Conference Planning Committee: