98 - Sessions and Topics and Toolkits - oh my!!! Previewing the 2025 Grading Conference with the Conference Organizing Team.

Episode 98 • 27th May 2025 • The Grading Podcast • Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

98 - Almost the whole crew

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Sharona: So Emily, you really worked on the program committee this year. What was that like and what are you excited about?

Emily: Yeah, so this is my first year to serve on the program committee. This is my second year on the organizing committee. First year on the program committee. And this year we were able to work with a really great team of four volunteers.

We had a call for volunteers and really an overwhelming response from a lot of people in the alternative grading community who wanted to contribute in some way to the conference. And we were able to select four great volunteers for the program committee from many different institutional types, many different disciplines and many different locations around the world.

One of our program committee members works in New Zealand, actually.

Boz: Welcome to the grading podcast, where we'll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students' learning. From traditional grading to alternative methods of grading, we'll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students' success.

I'm Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I'm Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the Grading podcast. I'm Robert Bosley, one of your two co-hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing well. It's been a beautiful couple of days here in sunny Southern California, so I've been taking advantage of my new apartment that I moved into that has an amazing balcony and I've had breakfast on the balcony for a couple of days, and finally sort of recovering from this academic year.

So I've had a good couple of days. How about you, Bosley?

Boz: Well, you know, the time of, of this recording, it is Memorial Day weekend, so I'm enjoying the extra day off. But unlike you, my semester is not over yet. And not only is it not over, but because of things that my office that I work in now are planning, we're having to do a whole bunch of planning meetings together that aren't on my calendars that get put on last minute.

So it's actually really hectic for me right now. So I'm glad you're enjoying the peace and quiet.

Sharona: Well, you know, I am enjoying the peace and quiet, but I'm actually being productive and getting caught up on a bunch of things that I was supposed to do months ago. So my moments of enjoyment are relatively narrow. I mean, 10 minutes to have breakfast on a beautiful balcony is not going to, you know. I have no sympathy for you, basically.

Boz: But the fun thing is, it's not just the two of us today. We've actually got a really packed virtual meeting room today.

Sharona: Yeah. In fact, I think this is the most that we've had on any single podcast episode, with the exception of the live one that we did for Mathfest. Speaking of which, I'm hoping to put that out again and do another live Mathfest recording. So those of you going to Mathfest, make sure that you look for that information.

I do want to introduce the people we have with us today, but instead of me talking for the next 10 minutes, even though we know I like to do that, I'm gonna ask them to introduce themselves. So, welcome most of our organizing team for the conference, and I'm gonna have Ashleigh go ahead and introduce yourself and say hello.

Ashleigh: Thank you, Sharona. My name is Ashleigh Fox and I am from the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, where I teach English.

Sharona: All right, welcome Ashleigh, and then Jenni?

Jenni: Thanks, Sharona. I'm Jenni Momsen. I am professor in biological sciences at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota, and I also am the director of the Discipline-based Education Research Program here as well.

Sharona: Wow, that is so cool. Okay, Emily.

Emily: Hi, I'm Emily Pitts Donahoe. I am from the University of Mississippi. I teach writing and rhetoric, but I also work in the center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Sharona: And Melanie.

Melanie: Thanks Sharona. I'm Melanie Lenahan. I teach biology at Raritan Valley Community College, which is right in Central New Jersey.

Boz: So welcome ladies. I'm glad to have so many of you with us. For those that didn't know, all four of our guests are all part of the organizing committee for the grading conference. And we've had all of you except one actually on the podcast before. So Melanie, I'm glad we finally get you on. We normally have a tradition with new guests that we're not gonna be able to do this time, but we've gotta get you back on just with your own episode and talk a little bit more with you get your origin story and how you got into this crazy world.

But I wanna welcome everyone. It's so good to see everybody this nice early Monday morning.

Sharona: So this episode is coming out about, what, two weeks before the conference? I think? Two weeks before the conference. And so we are definitely in the heat of preparing, but the schedule's now out. And so the first thing I wanted to ask each of you well actually I'm gonna start with Ashleigh. So Ashleigh, you've been our keynote speaker wrangler this year.

You wanna share with us a little bit about our keynotes and what it's been like to get to work with them?

Ashleigh: Of course, I'm so excited about all three of our keynotes. We do have Asao Inoue on our first day. Asao was the entire reason that I joined the alternative grading movement and I had been in touch with him just via social media in the past. So getting to brainstorm with him about his message and his evolution of alt grading for this conference has been really exciting.

I completely fell in love with Jeff Anderson when I listened to your double episode with him. He is so cool. So he and I have just met via email, but we have had copious amounts of communication over the last several months. And I know Jeff has really excited about his messaging.

We also have Eden Tanner, and I know conference participants are gonna be so excited about Eden being able to address that really difficult question of how do you handle this grading approach in massive classes. Now I don't tend myself to have those big classes, but I, as a teacher of writing, certainly feel overwhelmed by the workload.

So my guess is the people in all disciplines are gonna find Eden's methods really helpful. And her episode of the grading podcast was fantastic as well. So we have a really, really nice lineup of keynote speakers for folks.

Boz: It's interesting, almost every single conference we've had since the first one we have had a session about doing this in large classrooms and it is always one of the most popular sessions. So having a keynote that's really centered around that I think is going to be absolutely great. And I am like you really looking forward to that one.

Sharona: So one of the things that's really fun being on this organizing team is everyone has sort of self-selected into an area where they feel they can really provide to the conference. Ashleigh, you took on the keynote communications. I kind of wanna go down the path with everyone maybe and share a little bit of about what you specialize in. Emily, you really worked on the program committee this year. What was that like and what are you excited about?

Emily: Yeah, so this is my first year to serve on the program committee. This is my second year on the organizing committee, first year on the program committee. And this year we were able to work with a really great team of four volunteers. We had a call for volunteers and really an overwhelming response from a lot of people in the alternative grading community who wanted to contribute in some way to the conference.

And we were able to select four great volunteers for the program committee from many different institutional types, many different disciplines and many different locations around the world. One of our program committee members works in New Zealand actually. So we were able to work with this great team of volunteers to go through all of the submitted abstracts and figure out kind of where they fit into different sessions. And it was really fun to think about how to, I've never had the experience of organizing a conference of this size, and it was fun to think about how to create sessions that would be really appealing to people.

We had a lot of debates about. Do we wanna organize things by discipline or do we wanna organize things by topic or by alternative grading method? And so I think one of the things that we had as a kind of guiding principle in those conversations was actually that the disciplinary diversity that we have at the grading conference has been kind of growing over the past few years, is one of the great things about the conference. I know that it started off as a stem kind of focused conference, but recently it's opened up to a lot of different disciplines and that's why Ashleigh and I are now here as, as part of the organizing committee as people with backgrounds in English and writing.

So one of the things that we decided to do as we were putting together the program is to try to make sure that the sessions that we had had kind of disciplinary diversity within them.

So our first priority was not actually organizing by this is this is a math session, or this is a chemistry session, or this is a writing session. Some of them ended up being focused in those ways. But one of the things that we wanted to do was have a lot of different disciplines represented in one session. So you might have a session on specifications grading that represents different disciplines or on a specific topic that represents different disciplines and we were excited about that.

We were also just excited to go through and see if we could pick out what were some of the special topics and common themes that people were submitting papers on. So you'll see on the conference program there's special topics sessions on neurodiversity or on equity or on other kind of topics like that, that we highlighted as, yeah, this looks like a common theme of what people are talking about in the community right now.

So we have research sessions which are basically focused on, people doing alternative grading research, quantitative or qualitative. We've got all kinds of different research methods represented. We've got classroom case studies, which are very practical applications of alternative grading in a lot of different classroom context.

And then we have those special topic sessions which takes some take on some other topics that people might be interested in. So it was really fun to sort through, see what the community is talking about, and figure out how to create sessions and an entire program that would really represent that and give people a lot of good food for thought.

Sharona: Well, that's amazing. And as you were talking, I was just sort of thinking back to some of the other conferences I go to versus our conference and having been here since the beginning and seeing just the very organic growth. You know, we didn't do any of that the first year. Like we were barely functional the first year.

And it was originally. In its original envisioning, it was actually strictly a math conference. And I don't remember if we went to STEM the first year or the second year? It might have been the second year. The first year was actually a math conference specifically, and we had over 500 participants, not all from math, but it was really organically grown from that. So it's really fun to see that that disciplinary diversity.

But you said that you were working based off of the sessions we had. Which takes me to Jenni. Because Jenni, you were one of the big ones that helped us figure out how to get abstracts submitted and how to choose them. So you wanna share a little bit about that process?

Jenni: Yeah, so this year we adopted a new platform, the CMT system, which is a little bit of the behind the scenes, but it was a fantastic tool for us. It made it really easy for folks to submit and edit their abstracts. And then on the flip side reviewing abstracts, we had just a huge contingent of volunteer reviewers that made it really simple for us to assign. Everybody got at least two reviews, some folks three and four reviews we were able to do. And what I really loved about the system was that this year for the first time, I think we could easily send feedback back to everybody from the reviewers. So that was really nice and kind of one of those principles of alternative grading that we like to see in use.

And so with Ashleigh, we went through all of those abstracts and figured out who was a presentation, a workshop, or a poster session. That's something we have new this year we're testing out this virtual poster session. And I have to give a shout out to Drew Lewis, who's not here talking with us today, but he really made the backend of things really sing and go smoothly. I can't thank him enough for all the work that he did in helping us with the nuts and bolts of abstract submission and reviews.

Emily: I was gonna say, I should also give a shout out to Katie Mattaini, who was on the program committee with me. So Drew and Katie are a couple of our missing organizing committee members. And they've been on the conference team for a while. And I've been super, super helpful in getting the kind of newer among us oriented to the conference and.

Boz: And then I just wanted to jump in real quick. Jenni, you were talking about some of the new things that you guys had done with the abstract submissions and quite a bit of the behind the scenes stuff that we've actually done for the first time this year. And the reason we were doing them this year is because last year we had an absolute explosion of abstract commissions.

We talked some about this last year, just the amount of growth, and it really did, it overwhelmed us. And this year, you and some of the other committee members really finding ways to put some more structure that allowed us to get bigger, allowed us to grow this. And I want to put a huge thank you out to you and the rest of the committee for really finding ways that we could streamline so we could continue this growth. 'cause it's been amazing and we saw it again this year. The amount of submissions, it was great. So it's been fun to see this very rapid growth over the last two years.

Sharona: Well, and then Jenni and Ashleigh, I enjoyed working. The three of us got to work on those structural components of how do we describe a presentation, what are the various topics? And it's been interesting, particularly for me, to see the different disciplines because, I've been to a number of academic conferences over the years. I go to several math conferences. I now go to an engineering conference and I'm about to go to my first molecular and life sciences conference. But there's a lot of similarities to the way that those conferences operate. And so to find out what was so different both in terms of language and also when you guys said the other day, us writing people, we don't know what a poster is like as far as an academic conference.

Right? And then there was another thing we were talking about when we were doing this, about what research looks like. Was it research? Jenni? There was something about and I'm trying to remember where the conversation was, but there was something about basically proposing conceptual frameworks being something that people in the humanities or specifically English, do more?

Emily: Yeah, we were talking about how research in humanities can look a lot different from research, obviously in the sciences and social sciences. And it can be thinking about different kind of theoretical frameworks and, and critical frameworks for our work.

Which is, I think something that I guess everybody does to some extent, but when we say research in the humanities, we often mean things that are quite different. Which means that how we describe the different sessions, right? Has to change and adapt to all the different definitions of research that we have.

And so that was a really fun conversation to have with the committee.

Sharona: It definitely was, and it's not to say that you guys don't do qualitative and quantitative research in a statistical sense, but I think we were thinking about what is disciplinary research. Like in mathematics, disciplinary research could be trying to solve a new mathematical problem, or in the biological sciences it could be working on drug delivery or things like that.

So what does "research" look like in a humanities environment if you're not doing essentially a historical dive into historical literature. What does it mean? And so that was really fascinating in trying to come up with that language. And then Melanie, you're our communications guru and, what's that been like trying to figure out how to talk to over a couple thousand people with our system?

Melanie: Honestly, it's frightening. I've gotten better at it, but when you are going to send a communication to thousands of people, it does get a little scary. But I am, my title is Communications Wrangler, and I think I've had this title for a few years now.

I absolutely love it. So if you're listening and you've received a communication from us, it was probably from me. And so yeah, at first it is a little terrifying, but I've gotten, I think a little bit more comfortable with the platform and I really enjoy my role.

Sharona: Well, and it's critical 'cause that's how people get to know what it is that we're doing.

Boz: And something I wanted to let you know about on that, I don't know if I'm just noticing it more or if it really is happening more, but I'm seeing, 'cause I deal with a lot of the backend of the registrations.

people might have come to the: 2022

So thank you for that communication.

Sharona: I know that Emily mentioned a couple of the things, she's, that special topics and things, but I wanted to open it up to the floor. Is there any particular session or topic that caught each of your eye that you personally are looking forward to getting to?

Melanie: One session I am particularly looking forward to is the student panel. This year we have students from various courses that are going to talk about their interactions with alternative grading and their perspective. And I think it's so impactful and to hear the student voice. I'm really looking forward to that panel. I'm also very much looking forward to learning more about integrating alternative grading with our learning management systems.

And this comes up over and over again when I talk to folks about alternative grading. So I'm really looking forward to sessions on that as well.

Boz: I wanna kind of piggyback on that, not just that student panel, but there are several sessions that are geared around some aspect of the student side of grading and the student side of alternative grading.

So that whole kind of through line, I'm really excited about all of those. I think that's gonna be a lot of fun.

Jenni: I wanna tag on that a little bit 'cause there's also a panel with teaching assistants or TAs on there. I work with a lot of TAs. I teach one of our introductory courses on teaching in the college level.

And so I'm really excited to hear their perspectives on how it gets introduced to them and how they take it on as often a very daunting task to be doing that while you're also a graduate student and trying to attend to all of those demands of your research, the expectations of your mentor, and then you're being thrown into this classroom and kind of being told, so all the things you experienced through your K 12 and then into college, we're gonna kind of put that aside and we're gonna do this other thing and trust us it works.

So I'm excited for that session as well.

Ashleigh: Well Boz mine.

Sharona: I am glad I'm not the only one that steals things around here.

Ashleigh: It's true though, when you skim through the session titles, there are so many that feature the word student voices or student perceptions, and when I was doing my dissertation research on impacts of ungrading upon learning, I was most interested in talking to students, and that just ended up being less doable than speaking to faculty.

So I did end up focusing on faculty perceptions, but the good news is the people who care about alt grading and learning are also deeply connected to what their students think. So I heard a lot via faculty about what their students had reported, and faculty were usually really proactive about explicitly asking students.

How is this grading system changing your perception of this discipline? What are you learning? In what ways is this potentially less motivating? More motivating? That's been a focus of this conference too for a long time I would think, but we're just getting a far more dedicated look at those student voices and elevating them.

And that's why we're here. So I'm very, very excited about that.

Emily: Yeah. On the program committee, one of the first things that we did was go through all the accepted abstracts and try to kind of code them or categorize them in different ways. And I think the biggest topic that, the topic that had the most sessions underneath it, was student perspectives. And that expands across the research sessions, the classroom case studies, and also the kinds of special topics and panels and other things. So that's really exciting.

And I think a specific aspect of that, that I'm excited about is in particularly the session on neurodiversity and Neurodivergence. I'm really interested in to hear how some neurodivergent students are experiencing alternative grading because I know that there has been some concern, especially around the type of grading that I practice called collaborative grading or sometimes called ungrading that sometimes the structures are just not in place for those students to succeed, or they may be more likely to struggle in ways that are different for more neurotypical students.

So I'm really excited to hear about how alternative grading might support neurodivergent students or ways that we could create alternative grading systems that better support them. And I think kind of in tandem with that I am excited for the sessions about equity as well. At this particular moment, equity has kind of become a dirty word in a lot of circles.

So I think it's really important for us to be kind of highlighting those sessions. A lot of people come to alternative grading because they want to create more equity and more equitable outcomes for their students. So I'm glad that we are highlighting that as part of the conference as well.

Boz: Kind of building on that, I'm also really intrigued by some of these neurodivergent sessions. 'cause that was really one of the biggest lessons that I learned early on. Other than three learning targets isn't enough for a semester class. But that taking away all of my deadlines actually really was problematic for some of my neurodivergent students. That that structure was something that taking it away completely was actually really negatively impacting some of those students. And it was something that I, you know, I thought, Hey, of course everyone's gonna love not having any deadlines and rude, rude awakening, and big surprise, but.

Sharona: So one of the things I was thinking about when you guys were talking just now about the student perspectives is I think we have a couple of sessions on AI, but it's not a huge theme in the official sessions. I suspect it's going to be a massive umbrella overlay over the entire conference. That's been my experience this whole year. And one of the things that I think we are being especially challenged with in alternative grading, although I think that's just because we're more transparent in general, is the impact that AI is gonna have on gathering authentic evidence of learning. Because these grading systems are very much rooted in if we are going to grade anything, it's going to be authentic student work, and that our grades are based on those clearly defined learning outcomes.

I've had a couple of conversations and a couple of thoughts recently with some people where I feel that AI is, it's not an existential threat, that's not the right word, but I don't have another good word. I would say it's an existential threat to our current structure of higher education. Which is not a bad thing necessarily. But getting those students' perspective on these grading systems I think are gonna be really important as we start to grapple with the ways our students are using AI and to be honest, the very practical reasons why that might be the best choice for them. Even though from our perspective, it's a terrible choice.

So, I think that's going to overlay the whole conference. And one of the things that we're planning to do is we have social hours, optional social hours in the evenings, the first two nights, and there's gonna be affinity groups.

So if people are interested in talking about a specific topic, like typically we have a crafting topic, people are knitting or needle pointing or whatever throughout the conference and they're sharing, or whatever. But I think we're gonna end up with a quite a few of those AI conversations happening, sort of in around the water cooler, so to speak, in the hallways.

Which is our social hours, which we now have on breaks and on the evenings. So that's what I'm excited to hear about relative to those student perspectives. I don't know anyone else have, have thoughts on the impact AI's gonna have on our conference?

Emily: I think that's definitely true, Sharona, that it's hard to get away. I thought maybe today would be the one podcast or conversation that I had recently where we wouldn't bring up ai, but now here it's.

Sharona: Sorry.

Emily: It, it's like something that is No, no, it's, I know that it's a topic that you're super interested in and of course that I think a lot about as a educational developer, a faculty developer and a writing teacher. Because writing, obviously, one of the kind of first things impacted so yeah, I mean, I think you can't get away from it.

Every kind of gathering of educators, at this moment, we're gonna be talking about AI to some extent. I was surprised though, I will say that we didn't have more proposals that were around AI. And I really think that it's because alternative graders are already well placed to be. Number one, rethinking our educational system, right?

As you mentioned that that's gonna be kind of important in the coming years. And so alternative graders are already there, right? They've taken this huge kind of aspect of what it is that we do, and rethought it. Said, is this necessary? Why is it necessary? What are we trying to do with grades? How can we make it better?

So they're really well placed to be. Thinking about these problems on a larger level, and also I think well placed to be thinking about things like student motivation. Which is gonna be super important in the age of AI.

Anecdotally this is, I mean, we need a real study on this actually, but anecdotally, I find that people who are using alternative grading are also having fewer issues around academic integrity in AI. And maybe that's a correlation rather than causation. But I know in my own classes, I think alternative grading is a huge reason why I have not seen huge levels of AI misuse because there's a kind of built in system where students can revise their work, try again, keep learning, right?

It's not a one and done bad grade. And that they can keep learning even if they don't do well the first time. And they're rewarded and honored for effort and growth, right? As much as they are just first your performance. At the same time that I think it's gonna come up, I also think that we're really well placed to be thinking about this and to be talking about it in ways that kind of go beyond just like the cheating conversation.

Sharona: Well, and that's, to be honest, that's why I think it's gonna come up. Because for me, it's not so much the academic misconduct side of it. 'Cause I agree with you, like we do think it's less in these systems.

But there are a number of things that we want to be doing to collect authentic evidence of learning that actually could either be assisted by AI or I'm even feeling an obligation, I teach a a course, a critical consumption of data course, and to me, AI generated data is one of the biggest challenges my students are now facing. So I'm feeling the need to actually engage and teach them to critically consume AI. Which means playing with it. And what are the ethical considerations of involving a large language model. So I think that's how it's gonna come in more than just the standard "how do we prevent our students from cheating?"

I'm actually questioning are my learning outcomes correct anymore? Or do I have learning outcomes that were sort of still rooted in this old head knowledge kind of world? Because even Google searches, up until AI came out, were challenging to find some of the information, especially in mathematics. And certainly finding it at a comprehensible level. So I think it's gonna be a massive overlay, but not necessarily just because of the academic misconduct aspect. I don't know, boz, what do you think?

Boz: No, I, I, I agree. On both points, and I also going back to you, Emily, thinking that it's, and again, I don't know if this is just my, experience because of who I deal with. But it seems like a lot of us that are doing alternative grading are are already so open to looking at any kind of educational reform, that we've been ahead of the curve. That we were having these conversations before most other educators, and we're now, like you said, Sharona, we're moving past that just cheating conversation, which it's so played out at this point.

But we're having those conversations of, okay, it's here. What do we do about it? We know it's not going away. We're not gonna be able to shield our students or their work from it. So, like you said, Sharona, are we looking at our learning targets and changing? Are we looking at how we use it in the teaching?

So I think that's because most of us in the alternative grading world are already forward thinkers are already kind of looking at education as a whole and seeing some of its issues. So and again, like you said, Emily, I don't know if it's just our personal experiences, it would be interesting to see some research on it, but it seems that we're just ahead of the curve with the conversations.

Sharona: I think we're also ahead of the curve in the ethics sides of it because we've already again, been talking about the ethical nature of grading itself. So we have already started to have some of those uncomfortable conversations with ourselves and our colleagues about grading and the ethics of grading.

So having a conversation about the ethics of AI for ourselves. It's not even just our students. But some of us are going ahead and adopting the using AI in teaching and then some people are like, no, this is horrible. And what about the global south? And I think there's very valid perspective. So that's been really interesting.

I do wanna move on to another topic though, which i'm excited to hear about. Our conference is kind of known for being different. Not just because of our topic. But just the structure of the virtual conference. I'm gonna share one of my favorite things just so y'all don't steal it 'cause y'all know what it is and I'm not gonna let anyone steal it.

But one of the things I love about our conference is what we call the chat firehose. So we have a conference of almost, you know, last year we had almost a thousand registered attendees. And we have our chat turned on for everyone in a webinar format, which means that you have six or 700 people who could possibly be chatting in a single chat at the same time.

Boz: And often are.

Sharona: And do, and often are. So we actually give instructions on how, if you don't want to be distracted by the chat, how to essentially open it and hide it so that you don't have that little bubble going up. But it has really been, in my opinion, the most active virtual community I've ever seen.

So I wanna know what, what is something exciting about the conference itself that each of you likes or something maybe that you dislike? Who wants to go first on this one?

Ashleigh: I think what really stands out to me about this conference compared to others I've been to is the focus on the practical versus the theoretical.

The word I've always used to describe the alt grading community is just generous. People are so willing to share not only where teaching methods have worked, but where they haven't worked. And it's just rooted in that that all grading philosophy, that failure is the path to growth. And I think we as a community embody that so much.

And the objective is always how can we pass along this information to benefit our faculty colleagues so we can then benefit students. I just feel like there's a wonderful toolkit you walk away from this conference with. It happens at a wonderful time in the summer. People are a little bit removed except you Boz from the semester and they're in a head space where they can authentically get excited about making changes for the upcoming semester, but then they still have the whole of the summer to think through it. So I'm looking forward to what gets put into that toolkit after this year's conference.

Boz: Yeah. And speaking of not just sharing our stories and some of our bumps along the road, but people are so willing to completely share everything they have. I mean, their syllabi, their learning targets. We've got different channels where people share things. I can't tell you how many times in the social hours or in our sessions that we'll just open up during breaks for people just to chit chat and kind of what we would call the water cooler conversation if this was a in reality conference.

But it's amazing how people are just, oh, you're teaching this class. You're struggling with this here, here. So yeah, you can come away with so many resources. It is absolutely amazing how willing people are to share almost anything and everything they have.

Sharona: They really do. And I love the fact that we record everything. It all gets made available to registered attendees and then a few months later, many of the sessions get posted, hopefully in perpetuity, if we can afford to maintain our website forever online. So people can even go back to previous years and see the recordings and get the slides.

And many of our people license their stuff, creative Commons by Attribution. So it is definitely a very generous community. Absolutely.

Boz: You're cheating. That's two things. What you, you, you had the, the chat waterfall.

Sharona: I was agreeing with you!

Boz: Because that is actually one of the things that I find so unique about this conference.

How many times have any of you been to a conference and you've seen two or three sessions going overlapping or going on at the same time and you're like, oh God, which one do I go to? We record all of ours. Sometimes it's a little bit different with the keynotes, but all of our other sessions are always recorded, always put up.

So you don't have that. You are like, oh, I've got, there's four sessions going on. I wanna see two of them. Now it's not a choice. Now it's, okay, which one do I see now and which one do I, wait for a few weeks till a month to come out on video and watch it then.

Sharona: Someone else. Favorite, interesting thing, something about the conference?

Jenni: I just love that it is so interdisciplinary. I find myself sitting in sessions with writing instructors or chemistry faculty, or whomever, and I always it helps expand my understanding of both what folks are doing in those classrooms, but also the student experience outside of my own discipline.

And that makes me, I think, a stronger teacher that I can more holistically understand my students and what they're experiencing. And I also, I mean we've talked about resources a ton, but I always get really good ideas. Like I remember last year I was in a writing one and somebody mentioned this AI assessment scale, and I was like, oh, this is giving me language to talk about when and where and why I want students to use or not use AI. So it was fantastic and I wouldn't have gotten that at another conference 'cause there wouldn't have been a writing instructor sitting in front of me.

Emily: One thing that I like about the conferences, that it's one big community, but also it allows you to connect with smaller communities.

So you know, there's the Slack channel that you can get on and find people maybe who are doing alternative grading in your area or people who are doing it in your discipline. There's a bio grading for growth community. So you have this huge gathering, but you can find within that smaller communities of people to keep exchanging with.

And we also have institutional registration. So if you come to the virtual conference, you might also run into somebody from your own institution who's doing alternative grading, and maybe you didn't know about that, or maybe you don't even know the person, right? But you can find people even in your own local space that you might not otherwise have found and be able to connect with.

And maybe if you're the only one at your institution doing alternative grading you feel a little bit less alone coming to a conference and finding other people who are using the same methods.

Sharona: Thank you for bringing up the institutional registrations. I think we're up to 20? Maybe 21 institutional registrations this year, which is a huge growth.

We are still making those available. So if you think that at least 10 of your folks, if you're have a Center for Teaching excellence, or you have somebody who has a grant that can pay $500 to get an institutional registration, it it greatly streamlines the process and we'd love to support that.

So that's been amazing. And I will make sure there's a link to the alternative grading slack, so that if you're coming to the conference for the first time, please join the alternative grading Slack channel. It is the number one back communication tool during the conference other than the firehose chat.

Boz: You know, and something I wanted to mention about the institution registrations, you have talked about, not just on this episode, but on previous episodes, how that has grown. And it really has. I think we are at 21. One of them doesn't have any of the people registered in it yet. But the one thing we haven't talked that much about is some of these institutions keep re-registering. Like this is since the first year that we've done institution registrations, we've had a few institutes that keep coming back, and it's not the same people either, which I think is absolutely amazing.

I do think that's a pat on our back that these institutions that are bringing multiple people keep coming back year after year. And I think we've had a few that this is their third or fourth year doing the institution registrations. So love and shout out to those institutes that have not just doing the institutional registrations, but now that this is their second, third time coming.

Sharona: And I'm excited to see what some of those organizations do that are able to get a huge group there. I'm not gonna call out their names, but we have one institution that's at 38 people coming. We have another one at 16. And then our other biggest one, we have another one at at 28. So now you're starting to get some real critical mass at some of these institutions.

So I think that's amazing and cool and fun. So thanks Emily for reminding us that we wanted to shout out the institutionals registrations and hopefully that'll continue to grow. That's actually what I, I'm sorry, I'm gonna keep mentioning good things if y'all don't do it.

The price of our conference. Thank goodness that we've been able to get to a size and able to keep our costs down so that we're able to not only provide a very inexpensive price for the conference itself. But also we have a pay what you can option, so that from a perspective of equity, you don't have to apply, you don't have to identify with a particular group. Like, oh, graduate students are poor, so we're gonna not charge them as much. Like, no, just pick the pay what you can and pay what you can.

And most people are able to to pay the full registration, which is amazing. So I'm very grateful to that.

Boz: Well, part of the reason we're able to do that this year in particular, and part of the reason we were able to do some of the things that we were able to do size wise is because this year we opened it up, we put a call out to our community saying, can we get some volunteers to help?

And the response has been absolutely amazing, not just from the program committee that Emily talked about earlier, but you are gonna see volunteers at all levels, including actually during the conference. So I would've put out a huge shout out to all of those volunteers. We could not maintain the size and growth and keep the cost down like we're able to do without these volunteers. So thank you to all of the volunteers at all the different levels of volunteering that you're doing.

Sharona: Okay. So anything anyone else wants to share about your experience being part of this community for a couple years? Being part of the organizing team or working with anyone on the conference?

Melanie: I just wanna say how grateful and thankful I am to be a part of this community and the organizing team.

I feel like oftentimes we're kind of teaching in our own silos. And being able to talk with others and share information and have like the courage to try some of these alternative grading schemes has really been a lifeline for me and I'm just so appreciative of this entire community and just one of the fun things that I found at the conference.

As being part of the organizing team we don't often, get to choose exactly what sessions that we're going to be in because oftentimes we're facilitating or helping with that firehose Chat. But what I found was some of those interdisciplinary talks, I think that Jenni mentioned, and some of the innovative things that are going on in classrooms. I was just blown away. Last year, I attended a session on badging and gamifying your alternative grading scheme. And I was completely blown away at the level of innovation that instructors are using. So I really like the variety of the different types of sessions that we offer.

And again, being able to reach out and interact with a lot of these folks after the conference has really been amazing.

Sharona: I wanna follow up on that real quick. I feel that the people I meet at this conference are my people. Regardless of discipline, regardless of institutional context. These are the people that if we could just gather all of us into one university and call it a faculty, like it would literally be the best faculty on the planet.

In my day job, people on the pod have heard me complain quite a bit this year about some of the challenges that I've had. And I think one of the reasons it's been difficult is because I have this contrasting experience of being with these super positive people that are completely open to just trying new things and not wedded to things have to be a certain way.

And I am definitely someone who thrives on change. And getting to see that change and getting to be a part of that change has just been so fulfilling for me. So shout out to this community. Y'all are awesome.

arted the planning kind of in: 2019

I don't know, April or May of: 2019

f how everything went down in: 2020

The amount of support that we give so our presenters can focus on just presenting and, like you were saying, Sharona, that that fire hose of a chat. Can you imagine being a presenter and being responsible for trying to respond to that chat? I've seen other PDs.

Sharona: I've seen people try.

Boz: Yeah. I've seen other PDs in conferences where that is the expectation. And again, that was not anything that was necessarily thought about and planned. That was something that we just kind of like, Ooh, we don't know what we're doing, so we're gonna put a lot of people in each session. And then found out, oh, there's a lot of things to do in these sessions.

So, especially if you're one of our newer presenters and you happen to be listening to this, like we really do, we put a lot of support in that, which I think makes the our virtual presentations better than most virtual presentations that I've seen elsewhere.

Sharona: And things like having a common slide deck so that we're not constantly switching screen shares and we start very much on time and we keep time and we have the q and a set up and running.

So all these little things make for an engaging conference in ways that I find very frustrating when I attend other virtual conferences. When when you waste seven or eight minutes of a one hour presentation on trying to get the screen share working, it's very frustrating. So, we're gonna have more volunteers this year, but the last several years it's been us.

And I remember one of the things that happened after the first year is when we finished the conference this is one of my pet peeves is you dump back into your house by shutting off your zoom and you're just done. It's like, for me, it's running into a brick wall. You don't have that, and now it's time to pack up my suitcase and say goodbye to people in the hallways and this whole like ending process. So we now do that ourselves as the organizing team, but the amount of behind the scenes stuff that we do to try to make it run smoothly.

The ways in which everyone on the team has contributed their thoughts and ideas and organizing skills has been incredible. So huge. Thank you to the four of you and our two missing members, Katie and Drew. We just, we couldn't do this without you, and the fact that it's sustained this long is just remarkable.

Emily: It's been fun.

Sharona: Well, that's actually what's remarkable is we run a 900 person conference and y'all come back. Like you don't go, oh, that was a nice time out. Right. But so just I feel so grateful to have been an accidental part of this amazing movement originally.

And then to see it keep going and to see how it changes every year has just been been truly amazing. Any last thoughts from anyone 'cause we're coming up on time, other than Bosley, 'cause he gets the closing thought. So, Ashleigh, anything, any last thing to say?

Ashleigh: I just wanna say that speaking of the fun, I feel like.

The fun is coming, like we've done all this hard work, so now we get to really, not that we're just gonna sit back and do nothing during the conference. It will be a ton of work, but it's, it's so energizing this piece of it. So really the best is coming in two weeks.

Sharona: Very cool. Melanie?

Melanie: And I'd also like to add too I think that we've come together as a cohesive group and just wanna chime in there about Drew and Katie as well.

They've really helped for us to organize ourselves over a year's time, we start organizing this conference after the conference ends. So I think that that's really helped. And like Ashleigh said, we're getting to that moment. Like, I can't believe it's only a couple weeks away when we're actually going to launch the conference.

So I'm really super excited about that.

Sharona: Emily, how about you? Any last minute, last thoughts?

Emily: Just that I'm excited about the conference and I I hope that if you haven't registered already, you will register right now.

Sharona: Jenni?

Jenni: Spend some time at the poster session. We've got over 30 posters this year for the first time ever, and I'm super excited to see how that turns out in ways we can make it better next year. And then when you're done with the conference. Go be active in the Slack community. I really love that space. It's one of my, it's one of my happy spots.

Sharona: And before I hand it over to Boz. I just wanted to call out a couple things coming up on the pod. We've had Jeff Anderson and Eden Tanner on the pod.

We are interviewing Asao as well. So that will come out before the conference probably next week. So I'm really excited for that as well. That's all I have. Bosley last thoughts and signing us off.

Boz: Well, again, another big shout out and thank you to all of our volunteers this year. We couldn't have grown the way we did .Without you guys and anyone that's listening, make sure, we've got a couple of weeks left. The registration is still open, so let's go. Let's go get registered and we'll see you in June and for everyone else, we'll see you next week on the podcast.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode's page on our website, www.TheGradingPod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley. And Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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