Looking ahead to #ALTC25. Vital dialogue for changed times…

By Keith Smyth, Chair of ALT’s Board of Trustees

When the ALT Annual Conference was last held in Scotland, at the University of Edinburgh in September 2019, we were unknowingly a few short months away from the world suddenly becoming a more precarious place. For education, the challenges brought forth by the global pandemic included the emergency move to fully online learning and teaching, the strive for equity of support for students who were now studying at home, and the continued diversification of digitally enabled practices during and beyond the lockdown period.

ALT, our membership community, and the wider communities we represent were at the forefront of responding to and shaping effective, evidence-based approaches to digital education within and following the pandemic. This we achieved and continue to achieve collectively and creatively, through critical consideration and reflection on current and emergent factors and developments. This includes the advent and subsequent championing and corresponding concern with Generative Artificial Intelligence, and within which context ALT has sought to facilitate a critically-focused scrutiny of what GAI does and does not offer education, including though this year’s OER25 Conference in June – on the topic of ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Open Education and AI in the Age of Populism’ – and September’s online follow-up event Open Education, AI, and Populism – Revisited.

Given the developments of the past few years, how fitting and fantastic it is, then, that this year’s ALT Annual Conference 2025 is returning to Scotland under the theme of ‘Stronger Foundations, Broader Horizons’, and with key sub-themes including:

• Back to Basics: Reclaiming the Core
• Digital by Design: People, Empathy, and Experience
• Learning in Motion: Connecting Pathways, People, and Places 
• Critical Imagination: Questioning and Creating in Digital Spaces
• and the wildcard sub-theme, which for this year is ‘Innovation from the Margins’

In a continued time of uncertainty, the conference promises to explore the above themes with a focus on how robust digital foundations can empower more expansive, inclusive, and imaginative possibilities, to shape a more connected and equitable digital future. 

Helmed by three excellent co-chairs in Laura Milne, Emily Nordmann and Joe Wilson, and with invited keynote sessions by Charles Knight, Gabi Witthaus and our Student Panel – who will be tackling the topic of ‘Beyond the Myth of the Digital Native’ – it is clear that the conference programme will be delivering, and then some, on the above promise.

In returning to Scotland for the first time since 2019, the ALT Annual Conference is also coming to Glasgow for the very first time, and many will say (including this born and bred Edinburgher) that this is very long overdue. 

Glasgow is a vital, socially and culturally rich, politically active city that is not only recognised as a seat of higher and further education, but has also been at the forefront of progressing access to informal, lifelong and life-wide learning including in community and workers’ rights contexts. Glasgow has also long been a locus of activity and commitment in relation to the work of ALT, and the home city to many of ALT’s most active members, leaders and trustees past and present. This includes Joe Wilson, convenor of the ALT Scotland group and one of two Glasgow-based co-chairs for this year’s conference alongside Emily Nordmann, with Joe and Emily co-chairing alongside Laura Milne from the University of Chester. 

In his recent blog post about ALTC 2025, Joe observed how this year’s conference, in addition to coming to Glasgow for the first occasion, sees another first for the ALT annual conference. This is in scheduling the annual conference for a time that is friendlier for colleagues who work in our colleges in the Further Education sector. This marks one of a number of current directions in which ALT as a membership association and charity is moving to further diversify our activities, and be as inclusive as possible with respect to our membership and the wider learning technology and digital education practice community.

In welcoming learning technologists and those working in wider relevant roles from across and beyond the UK to the ALT Annual Conference 2025, we hope to also be welcoming yourself to what we know will be a brilliant two days in one of the world’s finest cities. A full Scottish and Glasgow welcome awaits, including music and dancing at the Ceilidh that will feature at the conference Awards dinner. Dancing is optional of course, but either way we’ll be doing all we can to ensure that everyone will go home with a wee spring in their step!

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.