Dance Floors and Dialogue: Building Bridges at ALTC25

By Dr Emily Nordmann, University of Glasgow

This year will be my third ALT conference, and I am delighted to be co-chairing alongside Laura Milne and Joe Wilson, particularly as ALT returns to my beloved adopted Scottish home. I am a cognitive psychologist by training and an academic by employment; however, my research focuses on lecture capture, and I have always felt an affinity with the learning technology community.

My first ALT took me to a roasting hot Warwick where I felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing for most of the first day. But then I went to the Awards Dinner and had the opportunity to expand my network and perspective by talking to people in very different roles and very different institutions from my own. Through the power of a 90s-themed disco, I reconnected with old acquaintances who have now become firm friends (Anne-Marie, if you’re asking, I’m dancing), a reward entirely worth the price of spending the return train to Glasgow mildly hangover.

My second ALT featured the glamour of Manchester Airport, and I decided to join the pre-conference social meet-up. It tends to surprise people who do not know me well, but I am not good at these kinds of social events. Put me on a stage in front of 500 people and I am in my element, but put me in a room with 10 people I do not know, and I want to curl up in the corner. But I am so glad I went, because aside from pleasing my inner Nordmann-Viking with the joy of axe throwing, I got to know ALT legends Puiyin Wong, Julia Voce, Dom Pates, and Rich Goodman in a genuinely welcoming environment and I can’t wait to see them again in Glasgow.

More than that, what I found at ALT was the community I had been looking for. My work on lecture capture has taken me all over the world, something I am incredibly grateful for, but it is usually to individual departments to argue about individual policies and to reassure individual Schools and people that recording lectures will not be what destroys higher education. I have never quite found an academic or psychology-specific organisation where I truly felt at home, and it turns out that was because academics were not the answer. What I share with the ALT community is not a job title but a set of values. ALT is progressive, open, and inclusive and that matters far more to my queer little soul than contract type.

So the first point of this blog post is to say that if you are an academic wondering if ALT is for you, it is, and you can still register to attend. 

Second, I want to encourage all attendees of #ALTC25, regardless of your job title, to join us for the social side of things. You can find the details on Discord, but expect videogames, a running club, a traditional Scottish ceilidh, and excellent company. If you are like me and already halfway to curling up in the corner at the thought, I promise you it is worth it.

And third, I also want to use this opportunity to address the academic–learning technologist divide because as someone who straddles both worlds, I think it’s important to say some of this out loud.  So, with thanks to everyone who replied to my call on social media, here is my attempt at bringing us all a little closer to mutual understanding and respect.

For academics: Three things Learning Technologists want you to know

1. Learning technologists are educators, not IT support. They are experts in pedagogy, learning design, and educational technology and many have teaching qualifications themselves. Their job is not to fix printers or reset passwords, but to help us make teaching and learning more effective. Bringing them into the process from the start allows time to align teaching goals with the right tools. When they are only called in at the end, they are left to patch together workarounds for decisions that could have been smoother with early input.

2. Learning technologists work within complex and difficult institutional and political constraints. You know how difficult it is to get your single School committee to agree on anything? Well learning technologists often have to navigate competing demands from different departments, each convinced they are the highest priority. Many roles lack academic freedom, job security, or career progression yet they still hold responsibility for making systems work for everyone (whilst listening to academics complain about working conditions they’d kill for). 

3. There is always a gap between aspiration and reality. Academic creativity is to be encouraged but sometimes the available tools or budgets cannot match those ambitions. Learning technologists share those aspirations but also live in the reality of institutional limits and are often the ones left to find pragmatic solutions that make things work well enough, if not perfectly. When they push back, it is usually because they are protecting accessibility, inclusion, or consistency. They are not anti-innovation; they are pro-education.

For Learning Technologists: Three things academics want you to know

1. Most academics have never had it explained what a learning technologist actually does.
Some are prestige-obsessed monsters, yes, but most are simply unaware. When all you hear is “learning” and “technology”, it is not an illogical leap to think it means IT. Academics need to learn to ask, not assume, but we also need to make the hidden curriculum of professional services more visible to each other. For instance, if you offer “content creation”, tell us what that actually means because to my academic ears, it sounds like you want to write my lecture slides.

2. Failure to engage early is rarely deliberate. I say this as someone currently ignoring an email from my own learning technologist because my course doesn’t start until January. Academic workloads operate on a “just in time” basis; if it is not on fire, it is not getting attention. Does this make us frustrating to work with? Yes. Are we doing it on purpose? No. We are seasonal farmers who have replaced harvests with 15-day marking turnarounds. Our chaos is structural, not personal.

3. Academics are not all the same, and many care deeply about teaching. In the same way that the educational expertise of learning technologists is undervalued by academics, so the reverse can be true. Lots of academics aren’t experts in pedagogy or learning design, but some of us are. Assuming we’re subject-specialists who will do the bare minimum to get back to our research will start the relationship off on the wrong foot as badly as when we assume you’re there to fix the printer. We also often have a lot of experience on the ground – in the same way you might push back because you know your constraints, I might push back because after a decade of teaching first year students, I’ve learned a lot about the unintended consequences of even the most evidence-informed approaches when it’s applied to 600 18 year old’s.

See you all on the dance floor 😊

ALT’s Annual Conference is one of the UK’s largest conferences for learning technology and digital education professionals. The conference provides a valuable and practical forum for practitioners, researchers, managers and policy-makers from education and industry to solve problems, explore, reflect, influence and learn.

ALTC25 will take place in Glasgow on 23 and 24 October 2025.  Register closes 20 October 2025.