Michelle Miller delivered the keynote address in the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center last week at the 23rd annual Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference. Miller is a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow and professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University. (Photos courtesy of Shawn Bell)

Brian Chervitz was one of the more than 500 education professionals from across the St. Louis region and beyond who made their way to the Millennium Student Center for last week’s Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

Chervitz, an instructional designer at the Goldfarb School of Nursing, was not only attending the conference for the first time, but he was also presenting. A friend on the conference planning committee encouraged him to submit his work on HTML elements in Canvas courses. Though Chervitz was hesitant at first, he applied and, to his surprise, was selected, giving him a chance to share his insight with other educators.

“Canvas has its own internal CSS – cascading style sheets – for design, making things look a specific way or organized a specific way,” he said. “I don’t know anything about JavaScript. I don’t know programming. I don’t know how to make a CSS, but I knew a little bit of HTML. I put together a suite of little HTML snippets that you can insert into your page regardless of your institution’s CSS that could hide information in a collapsible section or organize things into columns without using tables because that would be difficult for people to use screen reader. I made this whole suite of five or six things that I use to organize the pages to make them look professional and clean.”

That was just one of the tools attendees had a chance to take away from the 24th annual conference, held last Thursday and Friday.

Jennifer McKanry, the director for curricular design and assessment at UMSL’s Center for Teaching and Learning, once again served as the conference’s co-chair alongside Ana Quiring, learning innovation specialist for the CTL. They led a planning committee of 45 people hailing from 13 institutions in the St. Louis region, with additional help from volunteers on the ground during the two-day event.

Apart from the keynote address by Michelle Miller, sessions at the Focus on Teaching and Technology conference took place on the third floor of the Millennium Student Center.

McKanry, Quiring and the planning committee worked to create a diverse schedule of sessions that addressed everything from the basics of education – how to do good group work or how to do successful active learning – to more timely cutting-edge edge topics. The variety was designed to account for a wide-ranging audience that included people new to teaching as well as seasoned educators. However, McKanry added that the expertise of professionals in the region really drove much of the programming.

“One of the really cool things about the FTTC, and it being a regional conference is, in a lot of ways, the experts seeing what’s important to them in the classroom drives the themes and tracks that we develop for the conference,” she said. “Other than selecting the keynote, we find that the themes themselves tend to come from the proposals we get in the spring.

“That’s the great part of a medium-size conference. We really get to have people shine and talk about the challenges and struggles they’re seeing in the classroom.”

Michelle Miller, President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow and professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University, delivered her keynote address on “Teaching That Clicks: Learning at the Intersection of Cognition, Motivation, and Technology” Friday morning in the Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall in the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center. Educational technology has advanced at a rapid pace since the turn of the century. The assumption was that these technologies would be a boon to students. But learning activities that leverage this new tech often require more effort from students. During her 90-minute presentation, Miller investigated how cognitive and motivational research can be utilized to create both high-tech and low-tech learning activities that effectively connect with students.

During several sessions, seats were in short supply.

In addition to the keynote, sessions on artificial intelligence such as “Responding to Assignments in the Age of AI” in Century Room C were hot tickets, with attendees filling the seats and lining the walls of the space.

While last year’s conference was held virtually, this year’s in-person format allowed face-to-face networking.

“I’m always happy to see in-person conferences,” said Damon Walker, assistant teaching professor of information systems and technology at UMSL. “It allows for better networking opportunities amongst professionals, so you can communicate with other professionals in the field and share ideas.”

Walker said he was motivated to attend because he wants to look ahead, specifically at the intersection of technology and education, such as AI.

“We should be looking out for what our student body is going to bring in the future but then also making sure that it is taught properly,” he said. “Ethics is going to play an important role in AI and other technology that is taught in the future.”

Eboni Chism attended the FTTC for the first time last week. Chism, a program coordinator for Saint Louis University’s Jesuit Worldwide Learning program, said her previous experience in higher education was in student affairs. But in her current role, she teaches several courses and realized there were gaps in her knowledge of pedagogy. The FTTC served as a prime local opportunity for professional development.

Chism said her priority at the conference was to improve her teaching while still meeting her students where they are.