21st Annual Teaching & Learning Conference at Elon University

Elon University welcomes university and college educators to the 21st Annual Teaching & Learning Conference on Wednesday, August 13th, 2025. This free, fully-virtual conference is sponsored jointly by Elon’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) and Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT).

The Call for Proposals is now open!


Reimagining assessments: Sparking innovation, equity and impact to promote student learning

Join us for a half-day that explores the importance of centering students at the heart of our practices. We invite educators from across higher education to dive into how we shape our assessments for, and of, learning to be transformative approaches that prioritize diverse student needs, experiences, and outcomes. The Annual Elon Teaching and Learning Conference invites 50-minute workshops and 20-minute research talks within one of our focused themes within the topic of assessment.

Proposals should be aligned with one of the four subthemes:

  • Students-as-partners: How do we invite students to be collaborators throughout the assessment process, through development, feedback, reflection, and redesign? And what does that partnership look like?
  • Leveraging technology to enhance learning: How can we thoughtfully use technology to create personalized, scalable, and adaptive assessments? How are we using AI as a tool to support learning?
  • Developing authentic and equitable assessments: How do we emphasize the skills of problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation, and collaborations into our classroom assessments in order to prepare students to tackle professional and societal challenges? How do we develop culturally responsive and accessible assessment while also
  • Measuring impact: How do we know when our assessments are successful or how do we know our feedback is supporting student growth? What metrics of impact should we be considering when we are designing and evaluating our own teaching?

We invite proposals for three session types:

  • Interactive Workshop: 50-minute evidence-based workshop. These sessions seek to engage attendees in applying, creating, and discussing a specific topic. Proposals must include a detailed outline of activities and how they plan on engaging participants.
  • Sharing Pedagogies and Practice: 20-minute presentations highlighting a teaching strategy and its impact, and/or scholarship around teaching and learning. (Note: 5 minutes of questions will be allotted at the end of the 20-minute presentation).

Proposal submissions are now open. The submission deadline for this year’s conference is March 21 at 11:59pm EST, and presenter slots are limited. For questions, please contact tlc@elon.edu.

About our Keynote Speaker

Kristina Meinking headshot

Kristina Meinking is Professor of Classical Studies and the inaugural Trustee Chair of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Elon University in Elon, N.C.

Kristina’s work within the scholarship of teaching and learning began in the Latin classroom and grew to focus on student-as-partners, co-creation in teaching and learning, alternative assessment strategies, as well as cultivating trust and embracing vulnerability. Her time as an Associate Director in Elon’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning and as the Assistant Director for Assessment in Elon’s Core Curriculum significantly shaped her approaches to teaching and her current project, in which she seeks to understand how potentially competing ideas about the purpose of higher education influence student motivation, curriculum, assessment, and classroom engagement. Kristina’s written work has appeared in edited volumes and journals such as Teaching & Learning Inquiry and College Teaching as well as journals in her home discipline of Classical Studies. In her disciplinary scholarship, she examines the world of late antique intellectual history by analyzing how later authors repurpose and re-envision their own past in ways that implicitly and explicitly comment upon their contemporary context. She is currently immersed in crafting a translation and commentary on the late fourth century CE historian Ammianus Marcellinus’ fascinating History.

About our Keynote Session

What’s the Point? Assessment and Authenticity in Teaching & Learning

What values do we hold about the purpose of higher education? How do these inform our teaching and shape student learning experiences? How do we communicate and honor our principles, and how do we work with students to cultivate the skills, competencies, and capabilities that we hope will endure beyond their degree? Underneath these questions lies a broader concern with whether a transformative learning experience is still possible: daily headlines decry a lapsing confidence in the educational system, confusion or exasperation over the use of AI, frustration over the lack of student engagement, concern over student well-being, growing attentiveness to educator burnout, and much more.

This talk will examine what current and emerging trends in teaching and learning reveal about a more deeply rooted preoccupation with the purpose of higher education. We’ll consider how our experiences and pathways shaped our own — and our students’ — ideas of higher education’s socio-cultural role. Next we’ll explore how those ideas show up in our syllabi, our classrooms, and on our campuses, with an attentiveness to how our assessments, especially, align with our sense of purpose. Finally, we’ll explore actionable and sustainable strategies for crafting student-centered assessments, bringing authenticity to our work, and embracing the messiness of teaching and learning together.