Virtual conferences became a more common format for hosting academic conferences after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtual conferences, like in-person conferences, provide a social network space for the people in the field. Thanks to technological innovations, often you can see the faces of the presenters and the audience and hear their voices online.
Are you excited or anxious about participating in a virtual conference?
Perhaps the answer to this question depends on many things, including one’s positionality in higher education. Being a researcher and a doctoral student, I was grateful that I could still attend virtual conferences at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. However, I was anxious because I did not know how to anticipate virtual conferencing. In this post, I share my experience as a presenter and attendee and my observations on the presentation differences between the three virtual conferences I attended during 2020-2021. My main goal in sharing these observations is to help orient other doctoral students who might also be wondering about a variety of new virtual conferencing opportunities.
I attended at least three different types of conferences: scholar and scholar-practitioner-oriented conferences, those with a blended focus on scholar and practitioner audiences, and mostly practitioner-oriented events. With different groups of audiences, conference planners appeared to adopt different formats and platforms for online conferencing.
The first online conference I attended was a practitioner-oriented U.S. national conference. The organization had over 23,000 members. They were forced to change from an in-person conference in May to a virtual format in July 2020. They kept the original time frame plans and made them all live Zoom sessions. I felt that this was great news for the presenters like me because we did not have to make many changes. Of course, the activities had to change to a digital-friendly format. There were over 400 breakout sessions. Though the number may seem overwhelming, the sessions were listed with details on the conference platform. We could create our own agenda by marking the sessions we wanted to attend. Their platform functions were well-designed. My co-author and I presented at a one-hour session. We integrated an icebreaker activity with polls to get to know where our audience came from. We had over 70 attendees, which was a large crowd. My co-presenter and I switched roles; when one person was presenting, the other monitored the audience chat windows. We had a Q&A discussion at the end of the presentation. A positive aspect of a live Zoom presentation was that you immediately received questions and responses or participants’ emoji responses. Another positive aspect was that recordings of the chat conversations and the presentation made it possible for the audience to come back to watch. The conference organizer saved all sessions on the platform for a year.
The second conference was a U.S. national conference for scholars and practitioners. The organization had over 1,100 members. It was planned for a virtual format and took place in October 2020. There were 200 breakout sessions. They provided explicit instructions on how to prepare for different sessions. My co-presenter and I had a 25-minute session. We were required to do a pre-recorded video for a 15-minute presentation and show up for the 10-minute live chat on the platform. When it was our session, the video was playing first followed by a live chat discussion. The live interaction with participants was a bit short. And as presenters, we knew they watched our presentation before coming to the discussion.
The third conference was an international conference for scholars and scholar-practitioners. The organization had around 400 members. They planned an in-person conference. Due to the fact that social distancing was still highly recommended, they changed to a virtual format. The conference was held in February 2021. There were 67 breakout sessions. Presenters were required to record a 12-minute audio presentation on the platform in advance for paper presentations. It was simply PowerPoint slides with voice. This made me feel less engaged as an audience member. Normally, four presentations share a one-hour slot in a paper presentation session. This time, we were assigned three presenters for 45 minutes. With my previous virtual conference experiences, it was unclear how the actual flow of presentation and discussion would go. It turned out to be lucky that the pre-recorded element was planned for, as Texas (where I am based) was experiencing a winter storm and power outages. Many of us had limited power or internet to attend the virtual conference. Some participants couldn’t even attend because of the rolling blackout. The 45-minute slot became a live interactive discussion of all presenters and participants, and we went over time. We had a deeper conversation with the other 10 attendees. We covered more questions because we had a moderator leading the discussion. However, only the pre-recorded presentations were made available on the platform after.
Although the three conferences were of different types and focus, as a presenter and audience member, I expected to have valuable knowledge-sharing and learning opportunities. Obviously, there were different levels of engagement. You will never know what the audience will bring to the conference. Live discussions prompt more engagement and idea exchanges. Perhaps not everybody speaks up in Zoom, but it is the same for in-person sessions. There is often not enough time for everybody to ask a question, and perhaps this is a ‘conference thing’ not just an ‘online thing’. Each conference has its unique audience, and it is difficult for conference organizers to know who is coming until they see the registration list.
It is my view that the virtual format conference benefits participants in a lot of ways. I believe the first benefit is saving travel costs and time. In previous years, I could only plan for one conference a year because attending a conference in my field was so expensive. Without my program’s financial support, attending conferences is not possible. Attending a virtual conference requires only a registration fee for me.
However, I acknowledge that others may incur additional costs, such as childcare, to fully participate. Arguably, this opens the possibility for more people to attend. Attending a virtual conference also saved me time that I would have spent on packing, planning for logistics (such as finding restaurants near the venue and arranging transportation), and traveling on buses and planes.
It is also arguably more environmentally friendly because it involves using less transportation. As Katie Tindle discussed in her post, time and costs are the main concerns for scholars to attend in-person conferences. The other benefit is that I no longer face a selection dilemma. When attending an in-person conference, I could only attend one of the sessions that go on at the same time. For some virtual conferences, I can watch the playback of other presentations afterward to learn more about the latest research.
These two benefits allowed me to attend three virtual conferences and participate in multiple sessions that I was interested in. Future conference organizers may consider continuing to use a virtual format while maintaining the quality of participation.
Bio
Chih-Wei (Amy) Wang is a Ph.D. Candidate in Educational Administration and Human Resource Development program at Texas A&M University, USA. She was a Graduate Research Assistant at the Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy and Learning between 2015 and 2021. Her research interests focus on human resource development, adult education, knowledge sharing, and coaching. She has published several peer-reviewed articles and chapters in edited books. She also published an article on an academic conference experience with two other authors in the New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development journal (https://doi.org/10.1002/nha3.20307). You can find her ResearchGate profile here.
Conference Inference 