O'Really?

Last week I attended the first Teaching and Learning conference in the Pendulum hotel, Manchester. It was really good and I got lots out of it. The sessions I attended were enjoyable and well organised, I learned heaps, made lots of new contacts and got some useful questions from the audience on my lightning talk about podcasting the student voice. If you’re thinking of attending or presenting next year, I’d thoroughly recommend it.

Thanks to Judy Williams, Jennie Blake, Hannah Cobb, Holly Dewsnip-Lloyd, Lisa McDonagh, Freya Corrywright, Beth Rotherham, Emma Sanders, Patricia Clift Martin and everyone at the Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL) for organising a great conference.

As far as I know, this is the first time a conference of this size has been run at the University of Manchester, a beta release, version 1.0 if you like. There’s some significant ways it could be improved when it returns next year. Here’s three improvements that I’d like to see in the next release, version 2.0:

1. A more findable web presence and citable conference proceedings: The conference which provided a good venue for practitioners to publish their work on teaching, get feedback on it and credit for it. The proceedings are available on documents.manchester.ac.uk but they are difficult to find and cite properly. To give authors due credit for their work, the conference needs to have a proper proceedings that can be cited. I’ve been involved in organising two similar teaching conferences in the UK: CEP and UKICER. Both of these events have citable proceedings, each paper has its own URL and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so their authors can be cited and credited properly, see doi.org/kjdn and doi.org/jbgm for examples. Having a proceedings means appointing a program committee who get academic credit for peer reviewing the submissions. Yes, doing all this takes time and money, but also incentivises high quality submissions which their authors (and reviewers) can get due credit for. Proceedings will show up in search engine results and get citations. At the time of writing, the only relevant result that appears when you Google for “teaching and learning conference manchester” is the call for papers from April (the month not the dean), everything else about the conference is currently invisible. As far as the internet is concerned, the conference never happened.
2. Better publicity: When I mentioned the conference to my colleagues, lots of them hadn’t heard about it, including many teaching focussed staff. Opportunities for teachers to get together and talk about the art (and science) of pedagogy are few and far between, so we need to let more people know that these kinds of events are happening. The announcement should go out far and wide, repeatedly but it wasn’t included in (for example) the weekly teaching academy update from Andy Weightman, see here for example.
3. A bigger venue: The lack of publicity meant that some of my colleagues found out about the event late. When they tried to register they were told it was full and were turned away. Since its takes such a lot of effort to organise a conference of this size (with six parallel tracks!), it doesn’t make sense to turn late registrants away so, next year, we’re going to need a bigger boat venue to match the better publicity.

So thanks again to all the organisers, I look forward to attending an even bigger and better Teaching & Learning conference in 2024.

[Update 14th July, after I published this post on 11th July some material from the conference was made available at www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/umitl/events/itl-conference/itl-conference-2023/ no papers yet, mostly videos]