Something I like to do for this blog is to post a review of any conferences I attend. My hope is that anyone who is struggling to find the right conference can look at my reviews as a guide to help find the “right fit” for them. 

This year I attended the SLATE conference in Naperville, IL. This was my second time attending and it had been several years since I last attended SLATE. The first time I went, the focus and content within the conference was very BlackBoard heavy. DePaul uses D2L, so the focus on BlackBoard really limited the sessions I could pick from.

I decided to give SLATE another chance this year to see if they broadened their learning management system (LMS) coverage. Sadly, for me, even though it wasn’t as Blackboard-centric, the only other LMS included was Canvas. I found myself with a limited amount of sessions to choose from, again, because the sessions were heavily based around LMS offerings that DePaul does not use. Despite the limited options, however, I did find some sessions that proved to have useful takeaways.

There also seemed to be a focus on new products, rather than new concepts, this year. Which I should preface with at this point, factoring the amount of conferences I have gone to and what I have already learned by working with my knowledgeable colleagues at DePaul, it’s getting harder to go to conferences and have those “eureka” moments.

If you are working at a college that is just getting started with online learning or you’re using BlackBoard/Canvas, then I think SLATE is a good starter conference. The conference is on the small side, so you will not feel overwhelmed by the amount of people or the amount of sessions. On the flip side, you might find yourself without a session to go to at times because the choices can be limited.

All of this is not to say that I didn’t find any sessions to go to. There were two that I really enjoyed. One was on escape room and the other about how to facilitate online courses.

The escape room session had participants teaming up with the person sitting next to us to go through a set of puzzles and eventually open a lock sitting in the middle of the room. As someone who is incredibly shy, and typically hates any activity that forces group work, I thought the activity was really fun. Escape rooms are all the rage right now and I think it’s a great way to encourage team building in a fun and challenging setting. The activity was taken from a company called Breakout EDU. This company offers escape room kits such as locks, lockboxes, UV light and more tools to help set up an escape room challenge in your classroom. They also offer digital escape rooms for online courses.

The other session that I attended, as I noted above, was the session on facilitating an online course. I immediately gravitated to this session because I am the facilitator of an online course at DePaul that focuses on how to facilitate an online course. My hope was to come away with something that could improve my course.

In the session we were presented with an online facilitation checklist that tells faculty what to do before their course starts, what they should do while its running, and what to do when it’s nearing the end. The portion on what do while a course is running, to me, was the most essential part of the checklist. Students should always have a sense that you are present in the course even if you are not there physically. One thing to note is that this checklist is customizable and you are free to add or remove anything that doesn’t pertain to your course. You can also change or remove things that might be handled by someone else, such as your school’s instructional design team or LMS Admin.

All in all, the SLATE conference did provide useful takeaways even though it did not focus on DePaul’s LMS.