The E.C. Moore Symposium on Excellence in Teaching brings the Indiana higher education community together to explore the tools and techniques that encourage student learning. The symposium offers an opportunity to discuss current trends and issues in teaching and seeks to foster collaboration across disciplinary and institutional lines. This year’s symposium will feature a plenary talk by Dr. Stephen Fox of IUPUI entitled Audiences, Purposes, and Projects: Making Writing Assignments Matter; Dr. Randy Bass of Georgetown University will deliver the keynote: Liberal Education Re-Bound: Designing Learning in the Emerging Digital Ecosystem.”

Registration for the symposium is now open.

Liberal Education Re-Bound: Designing Learning in the Emerging Digital Ecosystem  by Randy Bass

How might the new digital context—the whole of the emerging learning ecosystem—help us make higher education widely available to and meaningful for an expanded population of college students? Designing for that question compels us to look beyond the impulse to scale or automate current practices to a broader paradigm for learning that is native to this moment and one that is focused on the kind of graduates are we trying to produce for the year 2025 or 2030 or beyond.  This presentation will explore concrete approaches to this challenge through the lens of educating the whole person, where the role of digitally-enhanced learning is much broader than teaching targeted knowledge and skills. Approaches to educating the whole person ask that we join the best of what we know about deep and durable learning with the capacities that are intrinsic to the emerging ecosystem. How might we empower learners within digital environments? How might we move social learning from the margin to the center of educational designs?  What is the potential for learner analytics to create holistic approaches to advising? What are the consequences of the increasingly porous boundaries of our institutions for designing education to help every student develop a life of purpose? Such questions take us fundamentally into the central tension of our time in higher education between an integrative and disintegrative vision of learning.