Teaching and Technology Collaborative

Enriching Scholarship Conference, May 4 – 8, 2026

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Enriching Scholarship is free to all members of the U-M community. The first day of the conference will be held in-person at North Quad on Central Campus in Ann Arbor. Coffee and donuts, as well as a boxed lunch, are on the schedule, as well as a dozen sessions led by U-M instructors, researchers, students, and staff. The rest of the week will be held remotely, with a dozen more sessions each day. We use a Canvas site to to display the daily schedules and share links to Zoom rooms and resources. Registration opens soon.

In celebration of the University’s Future of Learning initiative, our conference theme this year is Life-Changing Education. Session presenters have been challenged to consider big questions like:

• What does education make possible? 
• How do we keep learning from one another? 
• How can we build better futures together?
• How does the value of higher education surface in students’ lives beyond the outcomes they expect?

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Keynote Speakers

The value added of college education in the twenty-first century is students’ ability to learn in new ways. This is difficult to provide in a context where technological development and sociopolitical challenges come so fast that we can’t know what will be new in a year, let alone a decade or two. This is further complicated by the decline of college as American society’s “great equalizer”: instead of offering life-changing education for all, elite colleges such as the University of Michigan risk becoming sites of advantage-accumulating education for some. This talk cuts through current debates in higher education about the purpose and value of college as well as about the nature of specific technologies, pedagogies, and policies: they should not be evaluated in isolation, but by investigating whether they foster student autonomy or impede it. The “sage on the stage” has already been de-staged; the talk concludes with optimistic observations about collaborative trends in college education where non-faculty staff and students are also all teachers and learners, just as long as universities entrust them with the autonomy to do so.

Mika LaVaque-Manty is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor of Political Science in LSA. He is currently the co-chair of Campus of the Future project, which is part of the Year of Life-Changing Education, and also chairs U-M’s AI in Education Working Group. He is a political theorist with a focus on human agency in institutional structures.

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Research consistently shows that students’ relationships with faculty and peers are crucial to academic success and personal well-being in higher education. With the rise of generative AI, human connections matter even more for learning, motivation, well-being, and meaning-making. Drawing on almost 500 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities across the country, we will examine how fostering relationships – especially educationally purposeful peer relationships – offers a practical, scalable, and humane path to ensuring that all students experience welcome and care, become inspired to learn, and explore the big questions that matter for their lives and our communities.

Peter Felten is a professor of history, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University. He has published nine books about higher education, including Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education(2023) and The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning(2025). Both of those co-authored books have an open-access online version free to all readers. He is on the advisory board of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and is a fellow of the Gardner Institute.

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What is the Teaching and Technology Collaborative?

U-M has a community of instructional support professionals who can help you understand the technology and achieve the best results in your teaching. Our goal, no matter where you start, is to connect you to the right support group at the right time to get your questions answered.

How to get started? Consider one of these next steps:

• Email us at teachtech@umich.edu
• Fill out the ITS Instructional Support interest form
• Browse the list of U-M Instructional Support Groups
• Visit our MIVideo site to see recordings from recent conferences

Attend Workshops Throughout the Year

Workshops are offered throughout the year at various locations. Click Upcoming Sessions above, or enter a topic of interest in the search box.  TeachTech workshops are intended to be accessible to all participants. If you require an accommodation to fully participate, please contact teachtech@umich.edu in advance of the workshop. All Teachtech workshops are free.