8,000 plus attendees converged in Philadelphia from Oct 31 till Nov 3rd for the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The anticipation and expectations were high going into the conference. The agenda was rich and exhaustive (and exhausting too!). Here is my take on the conference.

I know how much time and effort goes into organizing such a huge conference, so I want to thank EDUCAUSE and all the volunteers for their hard work to make this happen. I am going to express the honest way I felt with the hope that some of this will be taken into consideration in the future conferences. I have shared this with others including a board member! You can also see my tweets which can help better understand my points below. I have completely omitted the vendors below because I derive absolutely no value in seeing them at the conference. I totally get it that they sponsor the conference and we need their support, but I also know that there are a lot of other attendees who are interested in visiting and learning from these vendors, including collecting those silly swags. I am not one of them!

Networking – This is the absolute best part of this conference. It is so amazing that despite the fact that there are many ways in which we all interact electronically, there is something to be said about a face to face meeting and conversation. I met with a few colleagues and these are conversations that I treasure. Some were recounting old stories and some were about the challenges each of us face, and in some cases, just total random discussions.

Keynotes – The first keynote by Dr Kaku was deeply disappointing. It sounded more like the “Last ten years in Education and Technology” than “Next 20 years in Education and Technology”. I watch Dr Kaku in a lot of TV shows in Discovery channel and like those shows, but this was just a let down, especially after getting up early to be there at 8 AM. The second keynote on Decision Biases by Katherine Milkman, a behavioral economist from Univ of Pennsylvania was far more interesting. Whereas she talked about interesting experiments, many of us felt that the results presented in some cases were misleading in that the graphics was displayed in a way to prove a point rather than scientifically accurate with error bars etc. But all in all, I enjoyed her talk.

My recommendation is that EDUCAUSE collaborate with TED Talks for these keynotes – they should be crisp, engaging, interesting and to the point and most of us should be inspired and be able to take a few points out of these for further reflections.

Content – I was a bit disappointed by the presentations I went to. They ranged from what one would call “same old same old” to buzzwords like analytics everywhere. There were a few items that were take away, but nothing much. I agree that I go to these conferences to learn and bring home a few ideas that are worthy of pursuing. But, these conferences have gotten so big and that the commonalities amongst institutions whether it is the way we support teaching and learning or use analytics is becoming fewer and fewer. I think it is high time to create some specific tracks for research institutions, community colleges and small liberal colleges (or some such segmentation). One is not precluded from attending any of these, but a little bit more clarity to a track would be useful in such a large conference. I am also not saying that all programming should be this way, because some common topics such as women leaders in IT or first year as CIO type of topics are of wider interest.

Diversity and Inclusion – There were several tweets about the lack of diversity and inclusion amongst the presenters and I even learned the term “manel” – which refers to an all male panel. I think this is a very important topic and EDUCAUSE has an opportunity to take leadership role here. In the annual conference, having programming in this topic from experts or even providing guidance to the program committee so that the program is designed to be sensitive to these issues are important. Frankly, it will make the programming rich and more interesting in my opinion.

Return on Investment – I always think about this when I spend valuable money on such conferences. Whereas some of the returns are intangible, such as the networking piece, at the end of the day, it is our responsibility to think about it in the context of deficits in the institution and those students and their families who are working so hard to make it financially viable for the student to study in our institutions.

On balance, I still see some value in going to the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, but the ROI is on a steep decline.