A conference focusing on team projects for student success coming up in June

I kept staring at this artwork on the wall at a conference in Australia as for me, it relates to the individuality of students who only happens to enroll for the same course or porgramme 

During the industrial era, with its focus on the printing press, education was designed for groups. Learners were arranged according to groups and language and culture and lots of other group criteria. Luckily, with the dawn of the technology based, networking era, the focus is shifting away from groups to individuals. Also, but not so fast, within the educational system.  

The triangle of effective education has student-contentedness as one of its corner pillars and I am glad to see numerous academic conferences focusing on student success that acknowledge the fact that education must move away from mass focus to empowering self-directed, life long learning that is focused on individual students, accommodating their past, prior learning, and their development desires for the future. 

The Learning summit of the League for innovation in the community college that will be held at Paradise Valley, Arizona in 110 days' time (11-14 June) and it will focus on facilitating student success. This conference is actually a working retreat for institutional teams who are encouraged to identify a specific project related to student success. These projects will then from the focus point for each team during the workshops under experts in the field. The conference will be focusing on three important themes, namely Innovation, Engagement and Scalability. 

Information on the web page suggests that this conference is not open to individuals but to colleges and the college must be registered as a member to participate in the conferencing activities. With the focus shifting towards Multi- Interdisciplinary- and Transdisciplinary (MIT) research and teamwork and co-operation within Higher Education (at least in South Africa), it could be a good idea for academics to call together and organise people from different sectors within the organisation (university or college) to form task teams focusing on the three important pillars of effective education: Student-centred teaching, blended learning and transformative assessment.