“Making sense is the most important part of making” – EdMedia 2025 Conference Review
EdMedia 2025 hosted by AACE with Universitat Oberta de Catalunya brought together approximately 400 attendees representing over 50 countries in Barcelona, Spain. The week from May 19-23 was filled with learning, laughter, meeting old friends and making new ones. As of this week, proceedings are accessible in LearnTechLib with all best papers available as open access.
Unfortunately, my flight was delayed, so I missed the conference program on Monday. The opening keynote on Tuesday morning by Sylvia Libow Martinez made more than up for the travel fatigue. In her talk “Making the Future, The Future of Making” Prof. Martinez talked about the role of computers in supporting playful learning, and reminded the audience that the real revolution happened when personal computers became ‘’affordable’ (at $6000) and it became possible to experiment, take risks and fail in the digital world. She recounted the local example of the Sagrada Familia Basilica that is being built after the designs of Gaudi using 3D-Modeling. “Making sense is the most important part of making”, Martinez reminded everyone.
The construction of the Sagrada Familia Basilica, led by Antoni Gaudí, began in 1882 and is expected to be completed in 2026, marking 100 years after Gaudí’s death. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The roundtable ‘Beyond the Screen: Building Belonging and Community in Virtual Adult Education’ by Jennifer Gettings and Eva Mika from Loyola University, Chicago (US) was an excellent start into the session programming. Based on the social ecological model, they discussed the needs of asynchronous online learners, and strategies for creating a sense of belonging. I specifically took note of their ambassador program that alumni and senior students can enroll in to coach new online learners.
Facilitators and participant at the roundtable “Beyond the Screen: Building Belonging and Community in Virtual Adult Education”
Tuesday was a day of hard choices. I missed DeKita Moon’s presentation, who won a best paper award for her contribution “InterestMe Math: A Math Word Problem Rewrite System Integrating Career Interests to Enhance Learning Outcomes”. Luckily, we were able to connect and catch up during the many social events.
On top of her academic prowess, DeKita also shared an endless supply of chocolate bars. Hopefully a future EdMedia regular!
Likewise on Tuesday morning, Roger Wagner’s workshop offered hands-on activities in support of computational and creative thinking involving his development MakerPort. Participants created a project with animatronic features and were able to keep it afterwards for future use and sharing.
Here is workshop participant Pei-Ying Lin showing off her maker product as a group of participants explored the local neighborhood during the EdMedia Pub Crawl on Wednesday night.
It was a joy to see Sarah Prestridge (Griffith University, Australia) again at AACE EdMedia. I thoroughly benefited from joining her academic writing workshop last year. It has changed the way I structure my articles, and made me a better writer. This time, many more participants benefited several workshops on scholarly communication, and had the opportunity to discuss with colleagues how AI is reshaping academic practices in the workshop: From Brain to Bot: Is AI Writing the Future – and do we want it to? – co-facilitated by Ottavia Trevisan, University of Padova, Italy.
The workshop ended with a Compass Points discussion, prompting participants to reflect on what excites them about GenAI in academic writing (E), what worries they have (W), what they still need to know (N), and their stance or suggestions for moving forward (S).
Benedikt Brünner from Graz University (Austria) delivered a well-attended workshop on AI-literacy, using a tool that allowed audience participation in the prompting process to de-mystify programmatic features of large language models (Understanding the Core of LLMs as genAI – CollectiveGPT and Human Intelligence). Another contribution by the team of TU Graz that I thoroughly enjoyed was presented by Martin Ebner: “Longitudinal Study on Digital Equipment and Activities of Study Beginners at TU Graz (2011–2024)” – it offered a window into the everyday technology use of learners. Also of note, the team from TU Graz won a best paper award for their contribution Empowering Students through Visual Analytics: A Dashboard Redesign for Modern Curricula.
Conference-goers with an interest in learning analytics were rewarded with an in-depth, well-informed keynote by Bart Rienties, The Open University (UK). Prof. Rinties leads a group of academics who provide university-wide learning analytics and learning design solutions and conduct evidence-based research of how students and professionals learn. He shared a candid look behind the scenes, as well as a profound overview of the current state of research into learning analytics.
My long-time conference friend Madalina Tincu, Johns Hopkins University (USA), delivered Wednesday’s keynote on how generative AI impacts the work of instructional designers, followed by similarly-themed roundtable the next day. It was good to hear an instructional design perspective centered at the conference, as this professional group is a staple of the AACE community.
Facilitator and participants at the roundtable “Embracing Diversity through Inclusive Online Instructional Design and Storytelling in the AI Era”
The number of parallel sessions and some confusion about the workshop dates and time slots made the conference program at times a bit difficult to navigate. Not every talk was well attended – some presenters drew the short straw of time slots, and as always, conference breaks felt either too long or too short. The conference venue light and welcoming, and the technology support was prompt and knowledgable.
My own talks with colleagues from FH Muenster and UNC Chapel Hill on book sprints and generative AI and had between 5 and 15 attendees.
Good conferences are not merely a numbers game. The smaller audiences in many sessions allowed for deeper conversations and delightful serendipitous discoveries. I came home with many new connections to thinkers and doers in making, teacher education, design thinking and instructional design. A few examples:
Right before the opening party on Tuesday evening, Caitlin McKeown, NC State University (USA) gave an insightful, well-delivered talk on the instructional design process that her unit offers to faculty to develop high-quality, custom-tailored applications in a year-long, participatory and iterative design process. An example is the app ‘Sounds of Spanish’. Three Spanish professors, supported by an $8,000 NC State Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) Grant, spent one academic year collaborating with DELTA staff to develop the app along with maps of the Spanish-speaking world and its different dialect regions. This replaced previously used PDF documents that were not digitally accessible and had low usability.
Denis Moynihan and Anne McMorrough from Dublin City University, Ireland, shared their experiences in teacher training for using programmable robotics with LEGO Education SPIKE Essentials.
Presentation: Building a Real-World Integrated Curriculum in STEM
Elizabeth Childs, Royals Roads University (Canada) presented on experiences with micro-credentialing with OER material for early childhood educators. Not only was her presentation engaging, despite initial technology hiccups, she also shared a fantastic OER maker toolkit and connected me to the wealth of design thinking resources and expertise on her campus.
In addition to instructional design, generative AI and maker pedagogy, open educational resources (OER) formed another key theme go the conference, with many contributions by TU Graz and the team around Peter Weber from South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences, (Germany). The following papers stood out to me:
- Open Educational Resources in Ukraine: Current Status and Future Directions – the paper explored the relevance of OER in the context of crisis conditions – an interesting read for anyone interested in education in emergencies pedagogies and approaches.
- Properties, Drivers and Barriers of Open Educational Resources – the paper examined different dimensions of openness and their implementation in the context of the WFDT project – a government-funded initiative by three German universities to develop an OER curriculum on digital transformation.
Finally, the vision of openness was front and center in the talk by They Bastiaens who unveiled the concept of a Pan-European Open University. “Open should never be less”, he explained, describing the quality standards for international programs made possible by OpenEU.
When Friday came around, it seemed the conference had flown by. Technology explorer EdTech Tours Author Sonia Busson, founder of European EdTech Alliance, offered the last keynote of the conference. She shared examples from her book and website on innovative schools and universities. My final session was delivered by Skúlína Hlíf Kjartansdóttir, University of Iceland, on game-based learning, rounding out the conference.
Participants and presenter at “Teacher learning through gamification design : Insights from the ACADIMIA workshop on gamification”
The biggest message for me was the diversity of voices and perspectives. Today’s students, as tomorrow’s professionals, will need to be competent in using AI tools. Consequently, the EdTech community is currently driven by generative AI. However, this was not, by far, the only topic of interest. I look forward to the ideas, topics, innovations and resources participants will bring to next year’s EdMedia conference in Edinburgh.
