Rebuilding a Teaching Conference in a Pandemic: User-Centered Guiding Principles and Lessons Learned

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged educational developers, like instructors across the world, to pivot their traditionally face-to-face faculty development programs to online formats. At the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University (classified as research-intensive and the largest public institution in Virginia, U.S.), we faced the challenge of reimagining our annual pedagogy conference that scaled from 497 registered in 2019 when it was face-to-face to over 800 in 2020 as it was moved online. Under pressures of limited resources and increased uncertainty, leaders can find it difficult to imagine pathways toward innovation rather than just daily responses to crises, yet centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) need to take and maintain leadership roles in our institutions. Here we outline our programmatic goals, our guiding user-centered principles (from user experience frameworks;i.e., Zarour & Alharbi, 2017), and the user-centered iterative design process from learning engineering (Kessler, 2019) that enabled our evidence-based decision-making processes to select conference support technology platforms and create the conference infrastructure and workflows. We discuss a variety of data sources that informed our decision-making processes throughout the conference planning and actual event. We share assessment results and lessons learned that guide innovation in CTLs and can be applied to a range of educational development programs from large conferences like ours to small workshops and even one-to-one consultations.