Welcome to The Learning Ideas Conference Blog!

We’re pleased to introduce our blog, which will feature interviews and articles relating to the conference itself and to the learning community. We see the blog as an additional way to stay in touch with the conference community and to share new ideas about learning and technology.

For our first post, we asked our conference founder and chair, Dr. David Guralnick, to discuss the origins of The Learning Ideas Conference, its evolution from The International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace (ICELW), and what attendees and presenters can expect from the conference.

Q: What’s the focus of The Learning Ideas Conference?  How is it unique?

A: The goal of The Learning Ideas Conference is to create a space for open discussion and the presentation of new ideas relating to learning and technology. My view is that we’re in a fantastic position now to reimagine what education and workplace learning can be, by combining progressive educational methods with new technology, to reach people on a large scale. I think our conference is unique in its forward-thinking focus and that we’re able to bring together people from a variety of backgrounds—researchers and practitioners, people from higher education and organizational learning, people from various related fields and dozens of countries—into a single conference.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the conference?

A: Throughout my career, I’ve kept one foot in the academic world, including teaching at Columbia University, and one on the industry side, including consulting to and designing online learning products for corporate learning and development. One thing I had noticed was that there seemed to be a need for a forum in which researchers and practitioners could connect, all in one place—there was a lot of research that people on the industry side didn’t always have access to, and researchers weren’t always familiar with the real-world problems and needs on the industry side. So in 2008, I started the conference then known as The International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace (ICELW), to bring different groups from around the world together to share ideas.

Q: Why the recent change in the name? How is The Learning Ideas Conference similar to ICELW, and how is it different?

A: As the conference evolved and as the online learning world evolved, ICELW shifted its direction a bit over the year; we started to focus more substantially on new ideas, new learning methods, and new uses of technology. One of my goals is to further the field by creating new ways to help people improve learning and job performance, and I began to see the conference as a way to bring people who were working on new ideas together. So we rebranded as The Learning Ideas Conference, and also specifically included higher education in our scope, along with workplace learning as in the past. The new name is designed to capture the ethos of the conference, and to better describe the focus of the conference—and the way I see it playing a role in the online learning industry as a whole—the way that it has evolved. Ideally, we can grow the community that we’ve established over the years and also keep adding more ways for people to stay in touch and work together throughout the entire year.

Q: What should people expect from The Learning Ideas Conference 2021?

A: I’m really looking forward to this year’s conference. We have a great variety of keynotes that look at different areas of learning and technology and the science behind it and a great set of sessions, roughly 100 in total, with presenters coming from dozens of countries. Our conference proceedings, with papers written by those presenters who chose to do so, is being published as a book/e-book by Springer, a major publisher. And while we’ll be fully online again this year due to the pandemic, we’ll be providing a number of ways for people to connect with each other. I’m hoping that all attendees will enjoy their experience and will find themselves inspired and with new ideas to incorporate into their own work.