by Paul Thayer

I attended the Lilly Conference in Austin, Texas during January 5 – 7, 2017. The Lilly Conference was held at the Doubletree Hilton Hotel near the ACC Highland campus. The theme for the Lilly Conferences is Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning and is geared toward College and University Teaching. Over three days, I was able to attend fifteen breakout sessions in addition to the daily plenary presentations. Fortunately, ACC offered a few scholarships for faculty, and I was able attend in lieu of the full registration fee. The timing of the conference, between fall 2016 and spring 2017, was very convenient.

Attending the conference and sessions is an opportunity to hear from many experienced college-level teachers from across the country, along with a few international attendees. Lilly Conferences are offered at many locations throughout the year, so each individual conference can be fairly small, about 300 attendees. This allows more time for getting to know fellow attendees. This particular conference was in central Austin, making it convenient for about a dozen teachers from Austin Community College to attend. Several of the ACC attendees also presented.

Of many session themes, three most interesting to me were: 1) first-day warm-up introductory activities; 2) being aware of how new generations of students view the world; 3) how to provide better evaluation and grading while reducing workload. All of these themes were covered during one or more breakout sessions. There were several ideas I heard about for the first time, such as the “flipped classroom” concept; and many Internet-based teaching tools and techniques.

Two sessions pertaining to assessment, evaluation, and grading that I attended were: Specifications Grading: Reducing the Pain in Your Assessment (M. Patterson) and Using Artificial Intelligence Technologies to Evaluate and Improve Student Writing (A. Quagliata). I teach programming. One of my more time-consuming tasks is to read and evaluate hundreds of programming assignments. This is similar to grading Student writing compositions and essays. During a programming class, a lot of programming code is submitted. Labs have to be carefully read in order to provide accurate and useful feedback. This can take a long time. It was helpful to hear other instructor’s ideas on this topic.

One project I’m working on is to semi-automate the generation of feedback on student programming lab assignments. It is not as elaborate as an artificial intelligence program “reading” an essay and issuing a score. Rather, it is a project for identifying frequently repeated manual tasks that can be automated to reduce grading workload without reducing the quality of assessment.

Attending and participating in the full conference over three days takes significant time and energy, but it is worth it, as it helps to generate many ideas and “calls for action”. Some ideas can be implemented almost immediately; others may take a long time. I’m optimistic that the time invested in attending the Lilly Conference will prove to be worth it, by improving several aspects of my teaching and evaluation.