Technology and Education Seminar and Showcase (TESS)

TESS 2025: Reinventing Education for a Resilient Future

Date: November 11–12, 2025
Location: The Quay, Toronto, Ontario

Postsecondary education in Canada is at a critical inflection point, with significant global and domestic changes requiring the redefinition of our approach to teaching and learning. This necessity offers educators not only a challenge, but an unparalleled opportunity to reinvent pedagogies that better support learner success. TESS 2025 will explore these opportunities for innovative practical solutions that provide educators, institutions and learners with the tools they need to thrive in a transitional future.

TESS 2024: Transforming Together

Date: November 5–6, 2024
Location: Toronto Reference Library, Toronto, Ontario

With new challenges facing postsecondary institutions, innovation through collaboration will become an increasingly important way to maintain and advance the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. TESS 2024 will offer important insights on how digital transformation offers unique opportunities for the sector to work together to ensure the best outcomes for learners in a continually evolving future.

TESS 2023: Supporting the Digitally Empowered Learner

Date: November 1–2, 2023
Location: Globe and Mail Centre, Toronto, Ontario

This year’s theme – Supporting the Digitally Empowered Learner – explores how technology can open new doors to the knowledge and skills learners need to achieve the future they imagine. Reconnect with your colleagues at Ontario’s favourite technology and education conference. Enjoy 20+ presentations, a special networking reception, and participate in a shared experience with professionals passionate about the future of education.

TESS 2022: The Hybrid Experience: Designing the Future of Learning

Date: November 15–16, 2022
Location: Globe and Mail Centre, Toronto, Ontario

Last year’s TESS theme —The Hybrid Experience: Designing the Future of Learning —explored the evolution of an integrated digital and in-person education environment, what it means for the future of delivering vibrant learning experiences, and the steps we take today for a more effective and sustainable tomorrow.

TESS 2022 was focused on creating space for conceptualizing what’s possible; investigating whether hybrid learning systems can deliver on their promise of digital inclusion; and exploring the theories of hybrid pedagogies and how they translated into on-the-ground blended learning methods for delivering immersive experiences for all learners.

TESS 2021: Co-creating the Future

Dates: November 15–16 and 18–19, 2021
Format: Virtual event

Last year’s TESS theme of Humanizing Learning reflected our early experience of the pandemic’s impact on teaching and learning. We now emerge into a “new normal”, shifting from emergency remote education to a pedagogy that is digital by design – delivering high-quality online and hybrid programming at scale.

We have learned that we have the ability not only to survive but thrive together in the future. TESS 2021 is focused on how we co-create that future. Conversations will highlight learning from the pandemic – and the actions we can take, individually and collectively, to crystallize that learning.

TESS 2020: Humanizing Learning – Inspired Action & Impact

Date: October 20–22, 2020
Format: Virtual event

Inclusion is the backbone of innovation and is critical to building spaces that reflect the full range of human diversity. As technology continues to advance education, deepening human interactions in online learning environments is critical for success in higher education. Recognizing diversity, inclusion, and equity, TESS Online 2020 will examine the conference theme from the student perspective. Presenters will take into account access to learning, nurturing online communities that create spaces for all, and opportunities to create a more connected experience in both synchronous and asynchronous environments.

TESS 2019: Level Up Online Learning for Ontario – Experimentation and Impact

Date: November 18–19, 2019
Location: Globe and Mail Centre, Toronto, Ontario

Featuring the theme of Experimentation and Impact, the event combined presentations with a day of hands-on workshops, where attendees had the opportunity to experiment with technology in real time. For more information, recordings, and resources from TESS 2019, click on read more.

TESS 2018: The Empowered Educator

Dates: November 12–13, 2018
Location: 351 King St. East, Toronto

The theme of TESS 2018 was The Empowered Educator, derived from Simon Bates’ model of the 21st Century Educator (2014). In this model, the 21st century educator is also a teacher for learning, an experimenter, a technologist, a collaborator, a curator, and a scholar. At the two-day TESS conference, located at the Globe and Mail Centre in Toronto, over 80 presenters gave 36 peer-reviewed presentations that aligned with one of the six tracks of Bates’ model.

TESS 2017: The Evolution of Teaching and Learning

Date: November 20–21, 2017
Location: Beanfield Centre, Toronto

This TESS, we extended our program beyond the showcase format, providing a forum for educators from across Ontario, Canada and the United States to share experience and insight across a range of topics important to post-secondary educators. TESS also provided students and attendees with an opportunity to participate in the Student Experience Design Lab (SXD) where they explored methods by which faculty, institutions and students might work together in future to co-create content and shape new ways to improve student experience design.