Inspire 2024 is coming, and the deadline for submissions (May 17) is fast-approaching! 
If you’d like to share your expertise onstage in Dallas or Rome (or both venues!), we’d love to see your proposal.
To help you craft an effective submission, I’m going to share my draft along with some comments on what makes it successful. My annotations and commentary appear in blue italics below what I entered into the submission form.
Have questions, or want to provide me with feedback? Hit me up in the comments!
Suggested working title (We may work with you to change):
Building Effective Certifications: Standardizing Knowledge and Developing Assessments
Titles should reflect the scope, content, and impact of your presentation. For best results, lead with the value your session holds for participants, using the product as the solution where appropriate. (For example: Would you rather attend a workshop titled "Configuring E-Commerce" or "Drive Revenue with Paid Training Using Docebo E-Commerce"?)
Description of session and relevant learning objectives (200-300 words):
Certifications only matter to learners and institutions if they assess the right scope of proficiency clearly, fairly, accurately, and effectively.
In this workshop, attendees will learn best practices for building certification content from our lessons learned launching Docebo Pro.
The submission form only allows 300 characters, not words. We recommend keeping it short and simple for that field, and then downloading a more comprehensive proposal if you'd like. I'll share the abstract here. eUPDATE: There’s now a field with ample room to share your abstract, so please include a more detailed summary outlining your presentation and learning outcomes.]
Abstract: Deployed effectively, certifications benefit both learners and the institutions who use them. They standardize knowledge, credential learners, improve productivity, advance careers, position brands, and drive revenue.
But certifications only matter to learners and institutions if they assess the right scope of proficiency clearly, fairly, accurately, and effectively.
In this workshop, attendees will learn best practices for building certification content from our lessons learned launching Docebo Pro.
Although we’ll develop these points drawing on insights from our own case study, we’ve designed this as a practical, interactive session. Participants will discuss and apply each step of our certification model to their own use cases by completing planning exercises together. We hope to learn from each other and use this session as an opportunity to launch a Community discussion on certification content.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
- List the benefits of certification programs for organizations and learners
- Identify the key steps to launching certifications
- Explain the importance of standardizing the scope, accuracy, and framework of certifications
- Define what a Job Task Analysis is, and how it can be used to standardize scope, significance, and accuracy of certification assessments
- Understand and apply how Webb’s Depth of Knowledge model can be used as a framework for developing multi-leveled batteries of questions
- Strategize how to leverage Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for exam content creation and validation
- Know how to solicit and incorporate certification feedback to iterate and improve the exam
- Describe best practices for creating useful exam prep materials
Audience suitability
All Audiences- Session designed for all audiences. No prior knowledge or experience required.
Make sure you list any prior knowledge, expertise, or experience learners need to benefit from attending your session. Assume your audience has basic familiarity with both the learning industry and Docebo products and features.
Will your presentation benefit from allowing learners to get hands-on, or showing the product and platform?
Will you be showing a demo, or inviting learners to use a live demo environment?
For many (though not all!) DU @ Inspire presentations, the answer will be Yes.
Not Sure is also an option if you don't know at this stage.
Visual examples and dynamic media are very important to us. Do you have any supporting media to enhance this session?
Yes (worksheets, discussion)
Submissions that identify interactive media, real-life illustrations, and concrete exercises and takeaways hold more potential than abstract, vague proposals.
Upload Supporting Documents (if any)
While it's not necessary to upload media assets, it can help reviewers preview what your presentation will be like for attendees. This is an appropriate place to upload a fuller abstract, outline, learner outcomes, or visuals.
Theme (which theme does your session best align with?)
The Business of Learning
Choose the best theme for your presentation, and keep in mind that conference organizers may reassign your session to a track that aligns better with your content and with their programming needs.
There's an option not to identify a theme, in which case organizers and reviewers will categorize the presentation for you. However, if your submission doesn't fit any conference theme, there's a possibility it might be rejected on that premise.
Diversity and representation matters to us - our goal at Inspire is to highlight and elevate voices from all backgrounds.
Please share how your personal or professional journey, including aspects such as your education, career path, identity, and life experiences, could contribute to a diverse and inclusive conversation at our event. We welcome insights into how your diverse perspective or career path could enrich our learning and development community.
Ryan Woods is a writer and educator based in Athens, GA. He’s a Senior Course Developer on Docebo University’s award-winning customer education team.
Since earning a doctorate in religion at Emory University, he’s taught high school students at Atlanta Public Schools and undergraduates at Georgia State University, designed intervention programs for at-risk students, directed employment services and program planning at a large professional association, and served as an associate editor for a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. An obsession with the questions of how we learn anything and how what we learn influences how we live has shaped the unusual trajectory of his career.
Patrick Morales is a musician and filmmaker based in Athens, GA. He serves as the Education Program Manager for Docebo University.
As a leader on an award-winning customer education team, he manages the deployment of world-class enablement on Docebo’s products. The son of a Cuban immigrant, he’s worn a lot of hats over the years: touring musician, electrician, installation artist, and event a stint as an Alaskan fisherman. The unifying threads of these disparate experiences are a curiosity, a desire to learn, and a dedication to helping those around him.
Diversity of background, experience, and perspective are valuable to us! Who would want to attend a conference in which the presenters all came from the same backgrounds, looked alike, and shared all the same opinions about everything?
This is not just a bio or an exercise in the politics of identity. It's an opportunity for you to tell us who you are, what experiences you've had, and how your unique voice will contribute to the collective understanding. Conferences function like mosaics: their beauty derives from how the constituents interact with each other to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
