Why Every University Administrator Should Bring Students to Conferences

I’ve been in the education market for over six years now. I spent four years of research working on my edtech startup as a college student, and it’s been over two years since we launched. Along the way, I’ve attended education conferences ever since I learned of them my junior year at University of Arizona.

As a student, I was shocked the student leaders and student government on campus weren’t aware of the education conferences our administrators attended — and I was Presidential Chief of Staff for University of Arizona’s student government! Even being involved in marketing for the student government, not once did I come across conferences to attend or was I asked by administration if I had any interest in participating. Ironically, the way I found out about these education conferences was through a conversation with the co-founder of Blackboard who suggested I attend and exhibit in the startup alley to promote my own company at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.

A Harsh Realization

I was personally selected to sit on a technology committee as Presidential Chief of Staff in the student government at the university; however, what I came to find out though was that it was simply a “formality.” Unfortunately, what I discovered was that administration would tell me that students were “involved” in the process of selecting technology on campus, but the committee rarely had any impact. No real decisions were made by the committee. The students voices didn’t have much of a say, even if they thought they did.

Why was this? It’s because there was nothing really to make an impact on. It was always too late to impact a decision on new tools. I never knew that all the discovery of technology happened either at conferences or in demonstrations privately with administration and/or faculty.

So what quickly happens is the student voice is left out of the discussions and discovery early on in the decision-making and buying processes. If you’re giving students three options of technology to choose from without having them attend conferences and early product demos, then you are failing to include the student voice in the decision-making process.

How You Can Solve This Problem

You’re in luck because this is easily solvable! Many universities are in this situation, and there are easy steps you can take to include students in the discovery process, which can accelerate innovation on your campus. Including students in the process early on can help you convince faculty and your school to onboard new technology. When you have students at the center of your argument, this makes change management much easier.

1 ) Invite a student leader from your school to a conference

This should be rather easy for every administrator. Go out and talk to your tech committees and student government leaders. Ask them to recommend a few students who would be willing to help discover, vet and provide feedback on existing and potential technology for the university. Help them understand why their feedback is critical and valued.

This simple act of inclusion is one of the easiest ways to spark innovation. When you have students in a room together or virtually providing honest and transparent feedback on products and vendors you’re considering, it will undoubtedly be a transformational experience. You will wonder why you haven’t included students in the process before. I firmly believe you will impact change and innovation at your school by welcoming students into the conversation.

2) Form a student feedback group

Bring all those student leaders you get from student government, clubs and academic departments to voice their feedback. It’s important to get a variety of students from around campus. Don’t just focus on computer science students, for example. The more diverse, the better. Meet with these students bi-weekly or monthly to discuss your goals for products, invite them to demonstrations from vendors and hear their first-hand feedback. I’m telling you, this will be an incredible experience! And by the way, if you’ve ever wanted to make a point to faculty to change something, just include students in the room. It’s a lot harder to disagree.

3) Have your students lead a session at a conference

Are you spending most of your time looking at survey responses to gauge what students think? Do you go to conferences and just look at survey responses from administrators and that’s the whole session? No! Administrators get up and talk about their experience with something that they accomplished or think is worth having a discussion about. We should have students do this, too, because numbers are sometime easy to forget.

We need to hear real stories straight from students. We need to care about solving the problem and act on it.

If we hide behind the stats or just accept them, progress will be slower — or it could continue to get worse.

4) Have students review products and talk to vendors

Do you often say, “yeah my students would love that” when speaking with a vendor? You may think you know what they’ll love, but how do you actually know? Perhaps the vendor is simply telling you something you want to hear. Why guess when there are students who can actually let you know what they want and need. Talk to the actual users and don’t guess what they need to be successful.

A good example of this is e-portfolios. Have you ever asked students if they needed this tool? Can’t they just use wix, weebly or squarespace to make their own website that’s publicly available to employers? And most of these are free or low cost to the school. Coming from an employer’s perspective, it’s much more appealing to me when I can see actual experience on the internet with tools than can be used for actual work post-graduation. I don’t see many companies asking their employees to use e-portfolios for work…

So Why Should You Do This?

Do you want to make an impact and help your school, students and faculty to standout from other institutions? Do you want your campus to provide the ultimate educational experience? Are you looking to save your institution time and resources? Does your campus struggle with change management? Do faculty complain about using new technology? Are you having student retention challenges?

You can get to the root of these issues by involving students at education conferences. I am confident you will have a fun time with students, and they will also learn a ton from you. Be their mentor, guide and advisor. Help them along their educational journey, and they will help you. Try it, and please share your feedback and success stories with me!