The 8th InPlace User Group hosted over 140 representatives from 25 Higher Education Institutes throughout Australia and abroad who came together in Melbourne for two days of networking, product and peer to peer learning from August 7th – 9th 2019.
The InPlace User Group is organised in collaboration by a committee of the users from various sites, and sponsored by InPlace and fit2work. The event comprised a packed agenda of informative and entertaining sessions, as well as an excellent networking opportunity for Work Integrated Learning practitioners.
This year activities included discipline specific placement-process focus groups, InPlace demonstrations, ‘tips and tricks’ and sneak previews of exciting new features on the InPlace roadmap, as well as informed discussions on the challenges and opportunities in the current WIL landscape and the rising focus on student employability.
“Never thought I’d be so excited to attend an IT conference…InPlace keeps getting better and better”
Lara Demetrios, Team Leader, Placement Service ACU
This was the largest User Group yet, and was hosted at a new venue in downtown Melbourne to accommodate the capacity audience. The atmosphere was buzzing with excitement and anticipation of great things to come from the InPlace team.
Special thanks to the conference committee of University of South Australia, Federation University, La Trobe University, Victoria University, and QuantumIT, which hosted and organised the event in collaboration.
Update 21 August
Sharing some conference feedback from the Anonymous survey:
“Conferences, in general, can be fairly stale but I must say I was very impressed. Well organised and fun team – competitions and prizes were a great touch to keep people engaged and give our brains a break. Well done! The next organising committee has quite the challenge to meet those expectations :)”
“Of all conferences I have been to over 30 years, this had the best structure in terms of facilitating networking and allowing users to exchange ideas and experiences on the usage of the product. Keep it up!”
“I think the conference this year was planned very well. It covered relevant and current issues. The ability to network with others was excellent.”
“It was interesting to hear how other education providers were managing placements and how different they were. It was good to hear the areas of strengths and weaknesses of the different arrangements.”
We agree, the User Group organising team next year does have their work cut out for them.
