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Earlier this month, I participated in the Leveling the Learning Curve conference at Columbia University. This was an academic gathering like none I’ve ever attended.
As we all are trying to figure out what our disciplinary and professional academic conferences should look like in a world of Zoom and hybrid work, the design of the Columbia event deserves our consideration. What was different about the Leveling the Learning Curve conference?
Difference No. 1: A Community Created From a Book Project
I’ve long fantasized that academic conferences should be more like graduate seminars, or maybe book clubs. The academic conference I want to attend is where everyone is talking about the same book. The Leveling the Learning Curve conference did my fantasy one better, as not only had everyone read the same book, but most of us were in the book.
My Columbia University colleagues and friends, Bill Eimicke, Soulaymane Kachani and Adam Stepan wrote a book called Leveling the Learning Curve. The book is coming on Sept 12 from Columbia University Press. To write the book, the authors interviewed over 70 digital learning leaders across higher education and ed tech. They then invited all the people they interviewed to discuss the themes of the book at the conference. We all got advance copies, and the panel conversations were related to the chapters we had contributed to as subject matter experts.
The result of all this work—writing the book and then assembling all the people interviewed in the book—was that book and conference felt tightly integrated. The standard way in which books and conferences go together, if they ever do, is to maybe have a book emerge from a gathering. The folks at Columbia did this the other way, creating the book and then convening the people who informed its writing. The result was a conference that felt like a continuation of a conversation.
Difference No. 2: University and Ed-Tech Leaders in Conversation
What distinguished the Leveling the Learning Curve gathering from other events in the digital learning space was the intermingling of university and ed-tech leaders. While other events bring together academics and executives (ASU+GSV comes to mind), the Columbia event did so at a scale conducive to conversation. With only around 70 people coming together, the event felt small enough that you could speak with most everyone.
The small size of the gathering also ensured that only a couple of people came from every university or ed-tech company. It is rare at conferences to be able to speak to an ed-tech company leader without a pack of their lieutenants in tow. Under normal circumstances, someone with a big job at an ed-tech company is running between meetings and other obligations. The Columbia event put everyone in a room for a couple of days with nowhere else to go, a setup that catalyzed deeper conversations. We have too few events where university and educational company leaders can sit and talk, debate and argue. Our digital learning ecosystem is now made up of universities and companies. We need to talk to each other.
Difference No. 3: Conference as Content for Digital Learning
The most novel element of the Leveling the Learning Curve conference, at least for me, was the intentional design of the event to develop new content for future digital learning projects. As I understand, these digital learning projects will range from online case studies (see examples) to open online courses.
For the conference, this meant that the in-person panel conversations were structured in a way to create quality video. You can check out the panel discussions at the conference website, and what you will see is unusual attention to factors such as lighting, sound recording and stage design. I’ve never participated as a speaker at a conference with so many media professionals, cameras and lights.
As a speaker (I moderated one panel and was a panelist for another), I felt sort of like the “talent.” This is an unusual feeling for academics such as myself, those who work primarily behind the scenes for our institution's online learning portfolio. It took some shift in mind-set as a conference participant and speaker to adapt to the idea that the purpose of the conference was both conversation in the room and content creation for educational projects. The design of the conference left less room for argument and debate than I may have liked, but on balance, I think the design of the Leveling the Learning Curve Conference represents a fascinating experiment in digital education.
Difference No. 4: Prioritizing Local and Global Student Participation
Another big difference in the conference was how student participation was designed into the format. And not only students in the building but students participating from all over the world through synchronous digital connections.
Present at the conference were a group of absolutely impressive young students from Bard High School Early College Newark. Also attending the conference were graduate students from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), which hosted the event. These in-person students were joined by online student participants from across the globe, many from emerging economies.
The absolutely amazing, polished and brilliant host of the conference—SIPA’s associate dean for diversity and community engagement, Jilliene Rodriguez—would always go to the students first for questions to the speakers. This is the first conference I’ve attended where the participation of local and remote students was prioritized in Q&A. All the technology seemed to work seamlessly, as the remote students were able to productively engage with the speakers. This was my first experience with a combination of in-person and remote conference that seemed to work well for everyone involved.
The organizers, hosts, facilitators and staff that put on the Leveling the Learning Curve should be congratulated for their willingness to try something new in designing a post-COVID academic convening. I hope that the event provides some buzz for their book (the book is fantastic; you should preorder) and that other universities follow Columbia’s example of experimenting with their own convenings.
