Presenting at the MCCA Annual Convention & Solution Center provides an opportunity to build your professional network and experience lifelong learning with peers across the state. Presenting a session individually or as part of a team is a wonderful way to share knowledge, experiences, and ideas.

​The program will showcase future directions, best practices, stories of successful collaborations, lessons learned, and solutions to community-wide issues within various program tracks.

Scoring & Selection Process

Proposals are selected to ensure education sessions create a comprehensive, non-promotional, objective, and diverse program. All submitted proposals and their ratings are considered to ensure topical balance within the program, educational needs expressed through member surveys and feedback, and MCCA's strategic goals.
 
Proposals will be reviewed by the MCCA Advisory Board using the following criteria:

• Relevance
• Topic coverage
• Presenter knowledge
• Engagement strategies

Interactivity and Audience Engagement

Based on feedback received from our 2019 and 2020 annual convention surveys, attendees expect more interactivity in session presentations as it helps reinforce learning. Posing questions and including activities in your session can make an enormous difference. Involving your audience helps the ideas and thoughts you are trying to get across be more memorable and make attendees feel like they are part of the conversation.

• Incorporate a live poll into your slide deck to get audience feedback, help guide your presentation, or to use it as a quiz tool.
• Use a couple of your slides as quick “quizzes,” ask the audience to answer, or fill in the blanks in your slides.
• Perform a demo and have an audience member participate in it.
• Divide your audience into small groups to discuss the topic among themselves and share it with the larger group afterward.
• Take time at the end of your presentation to ask your audience to share their experience about the topic.
• Place Q&A opportunities in the middle of a presentation to wake up your audience and invite a little participation. Even if you don’t answer questions right away, the unexpected invitation to ask a question can act as a trigger to encourage audience members to speak up.

Call For Proposal Step-by-Step Submission Guide

Presenter Comfort-Level Survey

While the professional landscape of 2021 is still in flux, MCCA is optimistic about our planning to host this year's annual meeting on-site in Branson. We know many of you are ready to network, learn, and perform other activities related to your professional advancement in person. Our goal is to allow you to do that safely. Responses to the following questions are required:
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• Does your institution currently restrict work-related travel to attend in-person events?
• Has your FY21 professional development budget been reduced?
• Do you feel comfortable attending and presenting in-person at MCCA21?
• If provided the option, would you prefer and/or feel more comfortable attending and presenting at MCCA21 via a virtual platform?

Session Formats

• Pre- and Post-Convention workshops: 3-hour, hands-on sessions taught in classroom style
• Track presentations: 50-minute session presentations
• Lightning talks: High-energy 10-minute talks, presented to attendees in the Solution Center throughout the day on Thursday. Presentations are introduced by an emcee to keep the program moving. The best lightning talks focus on one idea—big or small—and explain that concept or idea to an audience with varying skillsets.

Presentation Title

• Effective titles are clear and concise. Avoid making titles too long. (125 character limit)

Presentation Description

• This is the description of your session as it would appear in our online program for attendees.
• Describe what you plan to cover in your presentation, and what an attendee can expect to learn if they come to your session.
• Do not use special characters (a character that is not an alphabetic or numeric character) or formatted text (bold, italics, underlining).

Target Audience

This information will be used on the convention website and mobile event app, not as part of the acceptance process.
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• Administrative Professional
• Classified Staff
• Faculty
• Retired
• Trustee

Program Tracks

When it came time to create this year's Program Tracks, we had a complex undertaking (ahem, 2020 — and 2021 seems likely to follow suit). Higher education and our colleges face multiple possible futures and scenarios, each with its complex challenges and priorities. This year's Program Tracks and overall theme--RESET. REBOOT. RECHARGE.—represent the challenges our colleges and higher education are facing. Let's find solutions, together.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
At all levels of our organizations, we're working to implement holistic programs to accommodate today's diverse students, faculty, and staff. Presentations in this track may focus on:

• The ways institutions respond to campus issues, such as structural diversity, change management, transformation of institutional culture, and diversity skills and competency training programs.
• The ways institutions respond to student needs, such as housing and food insecurities, mental health concerns, neurodiversity, sexual identity, disabilities, immigration concerns, and racism.
• How colleges are supporting diverse staff and faculty or making institutions places that can retain diverse employees.

Digital Transformation 
The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technology as higher education scrambled to introduce online and remote teaching. To make this transformation scalable and sustainable, institutions will have to make radical changes. Presentations in this track may focus on:

• Strengthening modes of learning, such as blended learning and e-learning.
• Providing increased support for students' technology needs and enabling technology availability.
• Measuring institutional success and making data-driven decisions using big data.
• The importance of clear, effective communication with students, faculty and parents. Outdated tech can make it difficult, if not outright impossible, to communicate effectively.
  
• Using immersive technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) to allow remote students to take part in lab exercises.
• Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to offload time-sensitive academic and admin tasks, enhance enrollment, improve IT processes, and boost learning experience for students.

Enrollment & Completion
Many community college students do not complete a credential or degree, facing reduced earning potential. Evidence suggests that helping students navigate the college environment and connect their coursework to their lives can help solve the completion puzzle. Presentations in this track should may on:

• Overcoming challenges to recruitment and retention (costs, declining state support, a shrinking student population, etc.).
• Alternative credentialing models (certificates, badges, micro- and nano-degrees, stackable credentials, and job-related curricula).
• Creating successful recruitment and retention programs through student-focused efforts in admissions, financial aid, academic advising, course management, or residential living.
• Building more distinctive or memorable brands.

Partnerships & Apprenticeships
Community college isn't just about checking off general education requirements, but about providing a clear path to meaningful careers. Community colleges have a keen focus on meeting the needs of business and industry in the communities they serve by developing programs that get students out of the classroom and into well-paying jobs. Presentations in this track may focus on:

• What specific skills and backgrounds are needed by employers.
• How to successfully develop career paths that lead students directly to workforce opportunities. 
• Partnerships between community colleges and four-year institutions.

COVID & Beyond
This track engages Presidents, Chancellors, VP's, VC's, deans, chairs, and directors across functions and disciplines.

The long-term effects of the COVID-19 virus on the human body are still yet to be known, let alone the economic and social impacts. Administrators must begin to ask themselves questions about the near-term and long-term implications of the virus on teaching, learning, and the student experience. Presentations in this track may focus on:

• Reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
• Developing and partnering with new funding sources.
• Rethinking how to best utilize physical campuses.
  
• Monitoring and safeguarding the institutional community from COVID-19 and other health and safety threats.
  
• Cross-institutional partnerships or consortia shared services.

Special Topics
With the complexity of roles and responsibilities at different institutions, sometimes our work doesn't fit neatly into a single category. 

Preferred Presentation Date

• ​Concurrent sessions are held Thursday, November 11 and Friday, November 12. The MCCA Convention Team will try to accommodate your preferred date and time, however these requests are processed on a first come, first serve basis.
• We receive an overwhelming number of Thursday presentation requests. In order to better accommodate these request, we require a detailed justification of the reason(s) for a Thursday request.

Co-Presenters

Only co-presenters who will actually be in attendance should be listed. You may have many persons who worked on your project, but we list only those presenters who will be making the actual presentation. 

Audio/Visual (AV) Requests

Check only specific equipment essential to deliver your presentation. Technology should be utilized only when it significantly enhances the quality of your presentation. Please be conservative in your request and consider alternatives. Presenters must be capable of connecting their own computers to rented data projectors. MCCA cannot provide setup assistance to individuals at the conference.

Questions?
If you have any questions pertaining to this Call For Proposal Guide, please contact the MCCA Convention Team at events@mccatoday.org.