 Speaking at a national conference is a major career milestone, and this PD-Bite Professional Development Mini-Tutorial contains important tips to help you prepare and submit a proposal for the 2013 EDUCAUSE annual conference. We will help you understand the themes of the conference as conceived by the program committee and how you can connect your proposal to these themes. We'll also explain the many session types and options as well as the steps you need to make to prepare a successful proposal and we'll show you where to find valuable resources to support every stage of the presentation experience, including the proposal writing process. The EDUCAUSE annual conference has its own webpage which can be reached via the Conferences and Events tab from the main EDUCAUSE website. This page has links to the past year's conference proceedings and information that we hope will encourage you to attend and present at the conference. There are several key points for you to consider under the Why Present section, but we want to make sure you know that this conference is one of the nation's largest online conferences and you have the opportunity to present face-to-face at the conference, both face-to-face and online as a webcast, or online only from anywhere, including the Online Conference Command Center in Anaheim using Adobe Connect. We will talk about all of these options in greater detail later in this tutorial. EDUCAUSE is currently seeking proposals for half- or full-day seminars to be held on Tuesday, October 15th. Pre-conference seminars are workshop-style sessions for which participants pay an additional fee to attend. They are offered face-to-face or online and are in-depth discussions of a single topic or a group of related topics. If you plan to submit a seminar proposal, you will need to develop and submit a detailed outline of your seminar plans. Other than that, the same information we are about to share about proposing conference sessions will apply, so let's take an in-depth look at this process. The CFP page is organized around a proposal preparation checklist. These five steps will ensure you have collected everything you need in order to submit the best proposal possible. The first step is to make sure you create or update your EDUCAUSE profile, and in particular that you have information in the biography section because reviewers will want to have a sense of your background and professional experience when they look at your proposal and score it for potential inclusion in the program. There are a lot of reasons to have an EDUCAUSE profile, and we hope you will look at the mini-tutorial The Power of Your EDUCAUSE Profile to find out more, but one of the most important reasons is the ability to quickly submit a proposal for any EDUCAUSE conference. The next action item we encourage you to take is to explore proposal writing resources from the EDUCAUSE Speaker Concierge. The Speaker Concierge service is designed to help EDUCAUSE members navigate the entire conference presentation life cycle. From writing a proposal to designing, delivering, and promoting your presentation to leveraging the work you put into your session into other professional development activities, such as articles or blog posts. The Write a Proposal tab has an in-depth description of the proposal preparation process along with important tips and advice and includes a link to a highly recommended 7 minute podcast on how to write a successful proposal featuring advice from people who have submitted winning proposals and have also served on proposal reading committees. Going back to the checklist on the CFP page, you are next advised to review the options available for you to associate with and describe your session. Think of these facets as a blueprint created by the conference program committee to design the conference program. The committee developed this framework to help shape the content to the conference and to make it easy for conference attendees to find sessions they want to attend. As you write your proposal your job will be to accurately place your session into the conference context by selecting these dimensions that will be used to classify your topic. The first facet or descriptor that you will have to associate with your session is which of the five higher education core concepts best classify your session. The choices are collaboration, innovation, leadership, operations, or strategy and you should select the top two that most closely align with your topic. Next you will classify your session within six IT organizational domains such as data or information access and management or teaching and learning. Click on the show more links to read in greater detail how the committee describes these domains. Again you will choose your top two within these six choices. Lastly you will categorize your session by selecting the top two most closely aligning hot topics from analytics to virtualization. Remember these three steps of content categorization will help conference attendees identify sessions they would like to attend and will also help proposal evaluators place your session within the program so please take your time to be sure you've accurately classified your proposal. Returning to the proposal preparation checklist you will see the next decision you will have to make is what format you would like to use to conduct your session. We encourage you to consider how you would like to engage your audience. We are all used to the traditional conference session that simply disseminates information in the Sage on the Stage format. Is there a new way for you to share your information that will keep your attendees more actively connected with you and your topic? Take a look at the seven session formats we have suggested or choose the you suggest the format selection and describe a format you would like to use. Because this conference has an online component the CFP page explains the types of potential online delivery modes. There will always be a choice to present face to face only as some session types may not lend themselves to an online delivery format. If you are proposing a session that will be physically delivered at the conference location you can indicate you are willing to have your session streamed by a webcast to the online conference attendees. If your session is chosen to be webcast there will be a professional video production team in the back of the room to record the session. A moderator will be also in the room to monitor questions that come in from the online audience and now moderator will bring the questions to the speaker's attention at the appropriate time. It is also important to know that the session will be recorded and made available with the online conference proceedings. On the CFP page when you have expanded the description for a webcast session delivery option you will see that we provide a link to a sample webcast recording. Let's take a look. Here is what an EDUCAUSE webcast will look like to our audience as it is streamed live or from an archived recording. The presenter's slides will be projected as well as the current speaker. This will be important for you to consider as you submit your proposal. Will your session be amenable to this type of format? Can you offer creative ways to engage both the face-to-face and online audience? EDUCAUSE is at the leading edge of online conferences and delivering a webcast for an EDUCAUSE conference is an excellent professional development opportunity that we hope you will consider. Some speakers may be asked to deliver their face-to-face session a second time through Adobe Connect which is the platform for our exclusive online-only sessions. For these online-only sessions EDUCAUSE sets up a broadcast center at the physical conference location and speakers are able to come to this room if they are attending the conference in person. However, a speaker may choose to participate in the online conference and deliver a session from their own office. EDUCAUSE uses Adobe Connect to conduct these highly interactive sessions and we provide a link to a sample for this type of session as well. If you present an online-only session, you will have a great deal of flexibility in how you present your content. You are able to show videos or use a webcam or simply present using slides. We have the ability to pull the audience and EDUCAUSE staff will help promote engagement with the online audience through the chat area. If you choose to present an online-only session, EDUCAUSE will be by your side every step of the way. We will provide guidance on designing your session and will help you become successful in this increasingly important type of presentation. Knowing how to deliver a great webinar is an outstanding form of professional development and we hope you will consider conducting this type of session. The CFP page concludes with a section that describes the proposal selection process used by the program committee and details the speaker expectations should you be selected to present. This is also where you can submit your proposal to go to the live form. If you've done your homework and followed the steps in the checklist you will be able to go through this very quickly. You can see I'm now logged in so when I click the submit proposal button I go to the form with my information already filled in for the speaker information. You will be asked to confirm the information that is currently in your EDUCAUSE profile then click next. If you have additional speakers you will keep adding them and then you will enter the information you have already thought through and prepared. Once you hit submit your work is done for now as your proposal will be stored for review by the program committee. You will hear whether your proposal has been selected via an email from the EDUCAUSE speaker liaison in June. This mini tutorial on how to prepare and submit a proposal for the 2013 EDUCAUSE annual conference has been brought to you by EDUCAUSE professional development. This is Shannon Smith be sure to look for other PD bytes to help you get the most out of your relationship with EDUCAUSE.