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Stander Symposium 2020: Online, Live, On Demand

By Maureen Schlangen

In mid-March, as the University of Dayton was beginning its transition to remote teaching and learning in response to the coronavirus pandemic, scholarly conferences all over the world were being canceled or postponed.

UD’s Brother Joseph W. Stander Symposium could easily have met the same fate. However, using online conferencing, digital recording technology and UD’s institutional repository, eCommons, the April 22 symposium — an annual showcase of academic excellence at the University of Dayton — will go on as scheduled. The event will be open for browsing at 8 a.m. Wednesday, April 22. Get your virtual Stander day started at stander.udayton.edu. Following the symposium, all project documents and multimedia recordings will remain openly accessible.

“The Stander Symposium is a UD tradition,” says Andrea Wade, symposium coordinator. “Students spend months — sometimes multiple semesters — conducting research and preparing their work for Stander. Having to leave behind their classrooms, their labs and their friends for the rest of the term was already such a disappointment — especially for seniors; canceling the Stander Symposium would only have added to it. While this can’t take the place of an in-person conference, it's giving students an opportunity to share and showcase their mentored academic work, which can serve them well later on, especially if they pursue graduate education, research or academia.”

Watch live or Download anytime

Instead of browsing row upon row of posters in Kennedy Union or RecPlex or going from room to room for research panels and multimedia presentations, visitors can browse and download projects from a gallery in eCommons and either join live presentations through conferencing links or, using a customization designed for UD by the repository’s host, watch recorded presentations on demand through the educational video platform Warpwire.

“For UD seniors, this event marks a culmination, and for younger students, it’s an opportunity for momentum building and recognition,” says Stander co-chair Ryan McEwan, an associate professor in biology. “While we can’t replace the energy of in-person interaction, we hope that Stander 2020 can still be a day of inspiration and reflection.”

Repository: Much more than an archive

This is the University’s first use of eCommons as a presentation medium for a live event, says faculty co-chair Katy Kelly, an associate professor in the University Libraries. 

“This year’s projects will add to an archive of more than 1,700 Stander Symposium projects already in eCommons from 2012 to 2019,” Kelly says.

The institutional repository, a service of the University Libraries, is an online, open-access collection of scholarly works, administrative documents, research data, institutional records and archival materials. Stander Symposium projects have been downloaded from eCommons more than 35,000 times from 2,700 institutions in 150 countries.

Each project receives a stable web address, which students can use on resumes, graduate school applications, LinkedIn and social media.

Who is Brother Stander?

The symposium, founded in 1989 and first held in 1990, honors the late mathematics professor Brother Joseph W. Stander, S.M., UD’s provost from 1974 to 1989.

Browse past projects

To browse Stander Symposium projects from past years, view the comprehensive gallery in eCommons.

— Maureen Schlangen is e-scholarship and communications manager in the University Libraries.

— Stander 2020 graphic design by senior art and design major Erica Davis of Gibsonia, Pennsylvania.

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