Meredith Goddard and Aurelio Puente Present at EDUCAUSE 2024

Director of Enterprise Applications Meredith GoddardThe EDUCAUSE conference gathers over 8,000 higher ed leaders and providers from around the globe, working to solve the most-pressing challenges facing students, faculty, and administrators.

In a year with the most submissions ever, Lewis & Clark was represented at the conference through two presentations led by Director of Enterprise Applications Meredith Goddard and Education Technology Specialist Aurelio Puente.

Meredith’s session, Atomic Habits for a More Secure Cloud-Based Workspace, shared best practices for establishing a comprehensive security routine that is actionable and effective. A crowd composed mainly of CIO’s gained insight into cloud based dashboards for monitoring and automation.

While sharing successes and lessons learned from Lewis & Clark’s cyberattack in 2023, Meredith emphasized the importance of filtered information and at-a-glance data that can lead to actionable routines. This session provided not only information on Google’s Workspace tools, but also hands-on exercises that discussed higher ed’s unique complexities.

Education Technology Specialist Aurelio PuenteAurelio’s presentation, Empowering Students for the Workforce of Tomorrow: Liberal Arts in Action, focused on the AI For Creatives course that was piloted at Lewis & Clark in the spring of 2024. Aurelio emphasized the value of a liberal arts education and discussed the need to teach all students AI and design skills as key tools for success in the future of work. The presentation also drew from Canva’s 2024 Creativity in Education and Visual Economy reports.

“AI has become inevitable,” Aurelio said. “We are learning that you will not be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by someone that knows how to use AI. Educators and supervisors face the crucial task of equipping students with essential skills applicable across diverse career paths. AI is now a core skill that should be learned alongside word processing and presentation software.”

As a result of a successful course pilot and in line with the presentation goals, L&C has entered an agreement with Canva to bring Canva Pro to all students during a two-year pilot thanks to support from the Bates Center and IT. Additionally, L&C will be offering AI for Creatives in spring 2025.