I was at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference that was held from Oct 30-Nov 2 in Denver.  I have accepted to be a member of the Nominations Committee of EDUCAUSE. There was an early meeting on Tuesday, that I needed to attend, so I arrived on Monday, Oct 29. It was a beautiful day with temperatures in mid to high 70’s. But then, it was all downhill, cold and a day of rain.

EDUCAUSE’s commitment to diversity and inclusion was evident everywhere this year. It all started with the Nominations Committee where we discussed the importance of creating a diverse pool of candidates for the Board. You could see it in messaging, programming and social media posts. I have been going to EDUCAUSE for quite a while and the lack of diversity was striking at the beginning, but it has continued to improve, but we have a long way to go.

I was active in twitter during the conference and you can see my tweets here.

I participated in two panels and a poster session, all of them about our Workday project. There is considerable interest on this subject, so all the sessions were well attended and we had great questions.

I was there for only one keynote, by Michele Norris, titled “Eavesdropping on America’s Conversation on Race” in which she spoke about the Race Card project. It was a fascinating talk and very relevant for our times. Some of the “cards” she shared were very powerful and resonated with several of us in the audience. One of the most important question about this is whether those who should be reading these cards and listening to the issues are doing so!

As always, I met with several colleagues and learned a thing or two and hope they did the same from me. The repeating theme in all of this is that no two institutions are the same. It is amazing how, even amongst the small liberal arts colleges the organizational structures are so different and the ability to make progress is stymied in one way or the other. One thing that emerged as a common theme is that everyone complains about existing processes and systems and at the same time no one has the appetite for change…

There were so many vendors with so many solutions that we particularly don’t need. I always ask the vendors the question “do you guys calculate the return on investment when you come to EDUCAUSE?” And the answer always is that it is very poor. In other words, no one can point to the fact they executed a sale because of the presence at a conference like this. What I typically find is that existing customers want to learn more about new features or seek answers to questions that they may not otherwise get.

One thing I liked is looking at a couple of products in the “Start-Up Alley“. This is something new at EDUCAUSE this year. I stopped by CourseDog, a system that assists in classroom scheduling using a genetic algorithm. As the author of the classroom scheduling system here at Wellesley, I know the pain and I am always interested in the application of modern algorithms for this.

I also got a glimpse of an intriguing system for curriculum strategy called Coursetune. Really well done, but I was not able to quite connect the value proposition, so I intend to have a little deeper demo at some point in the future.

My issue is that we are currently struggling with too many systems in use even for a small institution like ours. So, adding more is not in the cards, but keeping our eyes and ears open for good solutions that can replace some of the inefficient ones, is definitely something I am very interested.