Vantage Goes to EDUCAUSE
The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is the premier yearly event for our Strategic Planning and Technology Management team. It is the largest gathering of higher education IT professionals and our community, and Vantage makes the most of the conference each year. As EDUCAUSE’s inaugural Strategic Partner, we sponsor the Executive Leaders Experience, host Executive Career Coaching sessions, attend the Annual Partners Summit, and catch up with hundreds of our peers throughout the week. Plus, this year we were fortunate to be selected as presenters in nine sessions and a poster presentation, which included:
- “Burnout to Balance: Leading with Wellbeing in Higher Ed IT”
Vantage leader: Valerie Vogel - “Redesigning Higher Ed Outcomes: Lessons from the AI Workforce Acceleration Board”
Vantage leader: Michael Berman - “Community Connections: Facilitated Conversations for Young Professionals and Senior Leaders”
Vantage leader: Shannon Dunn - “Higher Ed 2035: Redesigning Work, Learning, and Teaching for What’s Next”
Vantage leader: Joanna Grama - “Minding the Gaps: Learning-Driven Change for Strategic Data Governance”
Vantage leader: Susan Featherston - “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Career Transitions in Higher Ed IT”
Vantage leader: Cynthia Golden - “Building Belonging and Cultivating Culture: Strategies and Steps for Teams Anywhere and Everywhere”
Vantage leader: Shannon Dunn - “Federated, Not Fragmented: The University of Illinois System’s Collaborative Data Strategy”
Vantage leader: Susan Featherston - “The Many Faces of Emotional Intelligence”
Vantage leader: Susan Featherston - “The Rarity of Amazing: How to Build the Teams Everyone Wants”
Vantage leader: Kirk Kelly
Conference Insights
As a team of lifelong learners, we also relish the opportunity to hear from our peers who share their incredible work at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Vantage team members brought back new ideas and updated methods for the work we do for our higher education clients. Here are a few of our favorite takeaways from this year’s event.
Valerie Vogel, EDUCAUSE 2025
I appreciated how David Sherry encouraged everyone to find ways to give back to the community through mentoring and volunteer work during his presentation, “You Can Create the ‘Uncommon’ Ripple, But Fix Your Own Mask First.” This type of community engagement can happen at any level doing many different types of important work, such as reviewing conference proposals or chairing a committee. I appreciated the important point he made to ask your institution to support your volunteer and/or mentoring activities so you can dedicate time appropriately with the backing of your institution.
— Valerie Vogel, Senior Strategic Consultant
Cynthia Golden (left) with co-presenter Jennifer Sparrow (right)
Freeman Hrabowski‘s keynote presentation (“Resilient Campuses in Turbulent Times“) on the final day was pretty powerful for me. I especially appreciated that he talked about where we are right now, and how we need a “mindset shift” to better navigate the moment. He said we all needed to stand up for the truth, and we must operate with grace and kindness.
— Cynthia Golden, Executive Strategic Consultant
Susan Featherston, EDUCAUSE 2025
The enthusiasm for emotional intelligence at EDU25 was remarkable. Karen Warren of Wesleyan University, Mark Davis, Jr. of Swarthmore College, and I presented on the many ways emotional intelligence can show up throughout your career and in supporting our neurodiverse colleagues. We were greeted with a packed room of attendees hungry for practical resources. The conversations I had around neurodiversity and ADHD in tech were particularly rewarding, even moving.
Additionally, Kelli Van Wasshenova of Denison University and I enjoyed a lot of fruitful conversations with people who stopped by our poster presentation on research into the intersection of universal design principles, new neuroscience-backed change management models, and the socio-ecological model for more inclusive, human-centered approaches to change. We plan to incorporate many of their helpful suggestions as we refine our approach.
— Susan Featherston, Senior Strategic Consultant
Tim Pate (left) with presenter Jo Montie (right)
I attended “The Future Is Now: Gen AI and Digital Accessibility Skill Development” with presenters Jo Montie from the University of St. Thomas and Julia Sanders from Indiana University. They talked about how to harness individual curiosity around generative AI into institutional capacity for utilizing these tools. One of my favorite tactics they shared was the concept of “technology tasting” events: open houses that offer samplings of new technologies available across their institutions to educate stakeholders on what’s available, and to demonstrate their value in a curated setting. I thought this was a creative way of doing socialization, in an environment where they could also emphasize the features they had “baked in” to the tools for accessibility.
— Tim Pate, Associate, Marketing and Business Development Team Leader
Shannon Dunn, EDUCAUSE 2025
I had a conversation with Sarah Buszka from the Applied AI Lab at Waukesha County Technical College and Dr. Jenna Linskens from the Center for Instructional Design and Educational Technology at Ithaca College that was really interesting. Dr. Linskens wants to be able to ask vendors not only about what AI is integrated into their products and the data it’s based on, but also what environmental impacts their use of AI has. Like overall cost for solutions, this may require significant critical mass to achieve transparency, much less change.
— Shannon Dunn, Director of Strategic Team Operations
Joanna Grama (right) with co-presenter David Seidl (left)
I had a number of conversations with CISOs about the increasing complexity of that role and the need for an almost impossible amount of knowledge, both in terms of breadth and depth, to do the job properly: leadership acumen, technical acumen, regulatory acumen, subject matter expertise (security, privacy, risk, vendor management, human behavior), and more. The list goes on. Michael Corn and I discussed that we may be at another inflection point for the role, where it is simply too much for one person to do (and to expect one person to do).
— Joanna Grama, Senior Principal and Partner
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