Monday began with ACHE President, Roxanne Gonzales, bringing greetings from ACHE and sharing news from the National Association. Roxanne also was very persuasive in describing the ACHE National Conference this fall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Following Roxanne were David Bruce Porter (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), Jennifer Serowick (East Stroudsburg University), and Michael Southwell (East Stroudsburg University) talking about preparing faculty to teach at a distance. Much discussion ensued and it was difficult to move on to our keynote address by Dean Billy Cannady from the University of Virginia. Dean Cannady engaged the group with an excellent presentation on his work at UVA in the first 18 months since he became dean. His main message was to keep our focus on the "main thing," and he did that with us in a most informative way.
After lunch when we should have been napping, Steve Young from DeSales University had us rolling in the aisles with his humorous presentation, "Adventures in Adult Learning: A sidesplitting trip through the non-traditional student galaxy." No one slept through Steve's presentation! Following Steve were Jerry Hickerson (Winston-Salem State University) and James Harrington (Mary Baldwin
College) telling us about the key ingredients to a successful adult-focused degree completion program. Again, no one fell asleep through Jerry and Jim's excellent presentation. Ending the afternoon before a group hike to see the Natural Bridge was a session on HUPS - Helping Under Participating Students by Timothy R. Sanford from the Friday Center for Continuing Education at UNC-Chapel Hill. Tim's brief comments triggered a good discussion among the participants.
That evening with the rain holding off, we enjoyed a Natural Bridge tradition by seeing the Drama of Creation under the Natural Bridge. Along with the beauty and history of the area, this was a most unusual presentation.
On our last day, we started with our annual business meeting, but we quickly moved to a session presented by Emily Lewis from Morgan State University. Emily did a great job talking about the 21st century autonomous adult learner in the online environment. Her remarks prompted many comments and it was difficult to move to our concluding general session. However, Daniel Dowdy (Mary Baldwin College) and Dennis "Skip" Parks (California Polytechnic State University) quickly made us glad that we did have one more session as they talked to us about surviving the bad economy. Dan and Skip presented many useful strategies that continuing education units could use to survive and thrive in tough economic times. We certainly finished on a high note thanks to these last two sessions by Emily and by Dan and Skip!
MidAtlantic members left Natural Bridge enthused and enriched. They also hope to get to Albuquerque in October, and they definitely plan to join their MidAtlantic colleagues in 2011 for another outstanding regional conference!
