The 22^nd International ILIAS conference took place on the 7^th and 8^th September 2023 at the University of Cologne, bringing our community back to the place where everything began – 25 years after the first version of ILIAS went live.

A lot has taken place since ILIAS was conceived and developed in Prof. Dr Wolfgang Leidhold’s political science team. Right after the conference was opened by the team from Cologne around Dr Nicole Haack, Mark Kusserow and Anja Löwe, and a (sadly pre-recorded) keynote speech by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Teaching and Studies, Prof. Dr Beatrix Busse, we were treated to Prof. Leidhold himself, who spilled the beans on how it was back then. In an entertaining review, he traced how ILIAS came into being in the first place back in the 1990s.

The central role played by ILIAS today in the higher-education landscape, among business, the public sector and even in schools, could be seen in the enormous number of visitors. Even the Developer’s Conference the day before was slightly over-filled, with over 100 attendees. For the main conference, the organisational team had to stop selling tickets over the final days – all 300 places had already been booked.

The huge interest was no doubt due to the exciting programme that this year’s Programme Committee had put together. The selection was made this year by Claudia Glander, Nicole Haack, Marvin Hackfort, Anja Löwe, Eva Unterlechner and Karin Wessels. The conference’s motto was “(Fast) Forward to a Sustainable Future”, and saw both new and experienced users able to show the community how they use the learning platform.

Many of the contributions were again about connecting ILIAS to other systems. Whether via LTI or xAPI, or the integration of H5P content or STACK questions, with ILIAS (almost) anything is technically possible. For this, the topic ‘Open Educational Materials’ was particularly fitting, as the creation of complex digital learning scenarios is too complex and expensive for the fruits of this labour to be hidden behind the doors of a single institution or a single piece of software. It makes sense to publish such work as Open Educational Resources. The projects ORCA.nrw and Bildung für Nachhaltigkeit durch open educational resources vermitteln (BNE-OER) focus on exactly this, and presented their work to the community.

So that both learners and educators enjoy working with ILIAS, good didactics and user guidance are needed. Both of these areas were naturally also covered in the conference. For example, Judith Beißer and Richard Powers, from the University of Stuttgart, presented a catalogue of criteria for creating good ILIAS courses, which can help you to improve your own digital teaching.

Especially when it comes to unaccompanied, self-learning courses, it is important to keep the motivation of the learners high. Sarah Botella and Hannah Mönninghoff from the University of Hohenheim, showed us how good storytelling, the use of media and interactive elements can contribute to this.

In cases where ILIAS doesn’t include a desired feature, it can thankfully be extended. An example is the comprehensive solution to writing and correcting long text exams online that is currently being developed in the EDUTIEK project. At the conference, the developers Fred Neumann and Fabian Wolf from the ILIAS Society presented the latest beta version. A stable version will be released before the end of this year.

As expected, the presentation of the first whiteboard plug-in for ILIAS, proved to be extremely entertaining. Within a few brief minutes, the demo whiteboard was filled with content by the attendees and successfully passed its first major test in a real-life scenario in the Cologne lecture hall. This first version, developed by the University of Freiburg and the Spanisch ILIAS Service Provider, SURLABS, certainly put up a good show here.

The many presentations and workshops were anchored by two keynote speeches. Prof. Dr. Dipl.- Ing. Birgit Spies asked the question ‘When is digital teaching good teaching?’ - and used her presentation to search for answers. On the second day, the sustainability consultant Daniel Obst looked at digitalisation as both a curse and a blessing when it comes to sustainability. He invited all of the conference attendees to become active and encourage positive changes in their own organisations.

A further conference highlight was again this year our social event. The Cologne team had found the perfect location for the balmy late summer evening: directly at the Rhine, on the terrace of the Chocolate Museum, where we ate and drank well, made new contacts and deepened existing ones.

Of course, the presentation of the ILIAS Community Award was also on the agenda again this year. This year’s well-deserved award went to Stephan Kergomard, who, as a software developer, not only made the leap into self-employment as an ILIAS Service Provider, but also made a huge contribution to the further development of ILIAS as a member of the Technical Board and by taking over several vacant maintainerships.

We would like to say a big thank you not only to the sponsors, the presentors and guests, but also to the University of Cologne and especially their e-learning team who organised this great conference. And of course, we are already looking forward to the next conferences – first the spring DevConf in Karlsruhe and on the 5^th and 6^th September 2023, the next big ILIAS Conference in Graz.