Is it still a conference if the keynote speakers are all online?

Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels

Conferences are reverting to their traditional on-site format but the effects of the pandemic can still be felt in that it has become difficult to attract speakers to attend in person. Many speakers prefer to contribute online for both environmental and time-saving reasons. Travelling half way round the world to speak for 45 minutes, with the resultant massive carbon footprint, is simply not sustainable. The appearance can take several days out of a speaker's schedule and although the experience of seeing new places and making new contacts is very enjoyable, it disrupts regular work activities. During the pandemic we all realised that keynote presentations work very well online and now that the conferences are back on site many of the speakers are not. But what happens to an on-site conference when the speakers are all on screen and no one is actually on stage? Why pay high fees to watch a video meeting?

Conference organisers are now trying to put pressure on speakers to attend in person according to an article in Times Higher Education, Academic conferences scale back hybrid ambitions. Having the keynote speakers on-site means that they also attend other sessions and chat with participants during the breaks, meals and mingles. This adds value to the conference and justifies the fee. 

The moves follow concerns that the travel-free option for speakers is leading to empty podiums and an “us and them” culture between remote panellists and assembled delegates. Some organisers have also flagged the logistical complexity of enabling online speakers and the vastly inflated cost of running hybrid events, which often require numerous video and audio production staff, producers and technical support.

Many conferences are adopting a hybrid format, or at least a semblance of one, but the default is still on-site. Online participants can only attend some of the sessions and few have attempted hybrid mingling or social events. Of course there are technical difficulties with hybrid. Just as in teaching you need an advanced technical set-up to make hybrid work reasonably well and in my experience the online participants tend to take a back seat in the sessions. Online keynotes work best when everyone else is online but when you mix online and on-site there are always risks of bandwidth issues, sound and video quality or other technical hitches.

I generally present live on Zoom or Teams but when the conference venue is far away I prefer to record my session and let them play the recording in the conference hall. Then I am available live for questions afterwards. This minimises the risk of bandwidth issues and they get a high quality video to watch. At the same time I never get any real impression of the audience and no sense of place at all. The question time is often rather awkward since I can't hear or even see the people asking the questions and need to rely on a moderator. In addition, few participants are willing to ask a question in a hall at the best of times and even more so when the speaker isn't even in the room.

I have written on this theme several times here and firmly believe that large on-site international conferences are not sustainable and need to be phased out. It is absurd that while our colleagues in environmental science are sounding the alarm bells about the climate crisis, higher education is still responsible for high levels of carbon emissions due to our reliance on international air travel. On-site conferences are very rewarding but only for those who can afford them. Online conferences are not the same as on-site ones and we should stop comparing the two. They are still evolving and need time to develop new forms of interaction rather than trying to replicate traditional practice. They can be more inclusive and diverse and offer opportunities for longer collaborative processes.

But it's not a matter of a free choice between two alternatives. One offers us hope for the future, the other doesn't.

My farewell to on-site conferences - at least as a university employee

Session in the EDEN conference (CC BY Alastair Creelman)

I have just returned home from the last educational conferences of my professional career. I am retiring this summer and any conferences after that will either have to be by invitation or if I feel rich enough to pay it all privately (unlikely). I attended NU2022 in Stockholm, a Swedish national conference on pedagogical development in higher education, and EDEN's (European Distance and E-learning Network) annual conference in Tallinn, Estonia. My next post will discuss some of the issues raised at these conferences but here I will just make some general comments.

I must admit that although I have spent the last few years organising, hosting and participating in many online conferences and meetings, the chance to finally attend an on-site event was very welcome. It was wonderful to meet colleagues, mingle, nibble snacks and do a bit of sightseeing in the evenings. A reminder of days gone by and a nice way to round off my days of university employment. 

One theme I would like to comment on here is that of the role of the online participants and their use of the back channels. Both conferences were billed as hybrid with live streaming of many sessions and the option of a Q&A function or chat to interact with the on-site audience. In the Stockholm conference there were hybrid parallel sessions and although the production was fine there was virtually no input from the online participants. In my two sessions I tried to encourage questions and comments in the chat but sadly nothing came. At EDEN there was a Q&A function in the streaming platform that was used quite often but there was no room for discussion between participants. One interesting feature of the EDEN conference was the inclusion of sessions held exclusively on Zoom. Here, on-site participants, including presenters, had to find a quiet corner to sit in to take part in these sessions so that they were fully online and therefore avoided the risk of the on-site participants dominating the discussion. I did not participate in the Zoom sessions at EDEN but I am sure they were more interactive than the hybrid sessions because everyone was online and had access to chat and microphone. Maybe the conclusion is that the focus in hybrid sessions is almost always on the on-site event and the online participants do not see themselves as full participants. If you really want the online participants to be active then offer fully online sessions.

Both conferences had hashtags for Twitter but only a few participants took advantage of this to share ideas and links. I have always enjoyed the Twitter feeds at conferences because I get so many good reflections and interaction with other participants. It's also great to see non-conference people getting involved, thus widening the reach of the conference. I use Twitter to write reflections, links and quotes and then refer to the feed when I write about the conference later. The next post will do just that. It's sad that the Twitter discussions this time were a bit limited. Are people tired of back channels in general or of Twitter in particular or are people just reluctant to share their ideas?

Then there is the sustainability of on-site conferences. I firmly believe that we cannot continue holding large-scale international on-site conferences if we want to have any environmental credibility, given that most people have to fly to attend. Maybe justifiable if the majority of participants can travel by land. I travelled to Estonia by train and boat but I strongly suspect that the carbon emissions of today's giant ferries may even be higher than travelling by plane. I have not dared to investigate this.

I will try to keep up with future conferences by online participation unless something remarkable happens. But I thoroughly enjoyed this final fling.

Part 2 of this post will follow in the next few days.

Hybrid classrooms - impressive solutions but are we asking the right questions?

Photo by Col·legi de Farmacèutics de Barcelona on Unsplash

Educational institutions all over the world are busy redesigning their classrooms and buying lots of hardware to facilitate hybrid teaching. The pandemic has revealed a need to offer more flexibility in how courses are run, offering students the choice of whether to attend classes on site or online. Many institutions have been doing this for many years but suddenly hybrid has become mainstream and there is a frenzy of ed tech investment. The challenge is to ensure that the online students are not simply passive observers but can participate as fully as their counterparts on site. This inevitably involves more advanced technology in the classroom with multiple screens, microphones and cameras so that everyone can be seen and heard clearly and that slideshows, whiteboards and collaborative tools can be easily shared. 

Some excellent examples of hybrid classrooms are described in a detailed post by Zac Woolfitt, The future is bright - the future is hybrid. He describes how four European universities are redesigning their classrooms for a hybrid future: University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven, Imperial College London and Oulu University of Applied Sciences. All are very impressive and I urge you to read the article to get the details. Online students are visible on large screens, cameras automatically focus on the speaker in the classroom and high quality microphones ensure that everyone is heard. Not only have they upgraded their larger lecture theatres to cope with hundreds of students at a time but they have also equipped smaller classrooms and group rooms for hybrid sessions. Some solutions are like sophisticated TV studios and each lesson will require careful planning between teachers and production staff. Others are less complex but still demand that teachers rethink their teaching to adapt to the technical affordances.

However, all of them admit that they have still not found the best solution and that hybrid teaching still presents many challenges. Complex technical solutions demand qualified staff to assist the teacher, or require teachers to be well trained in using the equipment; resulting in an almost impossible juggling act trying to focus on both teaching and on managing the technology.

Finding ways to combine collaboration online and on campus remains a challenge. Those presenting here thought that there is more hybrid collaboration than every before. The solutions provided currently work, but it is expected the demands and context will change in a few years. Some have only been running Hybrid classrooms for less than a year. The feedback from students will provide lots of input. Creating really good hybrid breakout rooms has not yet been achieved yet and requires improvements in the technology. For some students, it is not easy to learn remotely, and they want to be in class, in contact with fellow students.

They are all impressive initiatives that aim at providing all students with a high quality experience no matter how they choose to participate. However, I wonder if we are asking the right questions here. These solutions are expensive and unrealistic for many institutions, especially in less developed countries. I also wonder if we place too much importance on synchronous events. No matter how much technology you have in the classroom, any gathering of more than 30 students means that the majority of them will not say a word during the session and that interaction will be limited. Large lecture theatres, no matter how much technology you buy, will always favour lecturing with the teacher in focus. Of course there is value in gathering all students in a synchronous event from time to time. It reinforces a sense of community and common purpose. But I would like to see a greater emphasis on group work, investigating, analysing and solving problems, and this is done in a combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration rather than in large class meetings. Maybe the hybrid classroom does not need to be so sophisticated. Shorter focused hybrid sessions to set up the task and then let the students work together in hybrid groups. This requires lots of flexible group rooms on campus but those require often only a screen, webcam and microphone. Learning to work in virtual teams to solve problems and find solutions are also vital skills to learn for most professions in a world where international travel is likely to become increasingly unfeasible.

On-site, online or hybrid? It depends on what you want to achieve.

Photo by Alexandre Pellaes on Unsplash

As more and more conferences return to on-site mode, many feel the need to offer a hybrid mode where most of the event is also available to online participants. Is this just a symbolic gesture to show that we have learned something from the pandemic? How involved are the online participants and how do organisers charge for the online experience? How do we facilitate true interaction between the two groups of participants? Most importantly I think is the question of whether hybrid is the way forward of just an awkward and technically demanding add-on. 

Attending an online conference is very different from actually being there for many reasons. I have found that I sign up for more online conferences than I would ever attend physically but when I'm online I only attend the interesting parts and skip the rest. In some sessions I listen with one ear and continue with other work. I attend but I don't really engage. I am still at work and the conference becomes like background music with a few highlights when I fully concentrate on it. Maybe similar things happen with hybrid teaching. It would be interesting to study the distraction levels of campus and online students.

But maybe the answer is not to try and cater for everyone but focus on your target group. If the whole point of the event is for people to meet and discuss on-site then make that clear and restrict it to on-site delivery. However if an on-site event would automatically exclude important members of the target group then make the event fully online or even asynchronous. By trying to include everyone you risk excluding everyone and the event becomes a messy compromise.

I started thinking about these questions after reading an article by Mark Carrigan on the LSE blog, Is hybrid a desirable ‘new normal’ for academic events? The problems with hybrid are well known in terms of technical complexity and the risk of online participants being flies on the wall, passive observers. If you want an online audience then focus on that and don't try to do two things at the same time. Conferences can instead become processes with asynchronous online interaction over a whole week or several weeks. 

The equipment and expertise which are currently necessary to run a hybrid event mean it probably isn’t the right (or sustainable) choice for a relatively niche event that is unlikely to attract much of an online audience. In which case it might make more sense to have a physical event, with a collective output which can be distributed asynchronously. Digital artefacts like blogposts and podcasts have a tendency to circulate far beyond their original creators. The raw fact of access can be valuable, but the careful packaging of ideas and discussions can be a much more effective way of facilitating remote participation. It might be that only a small number of people would tune in synchronously to engage with an event, but a digital output from that event over time might assemble a significantly larger audience.

It's similar with hybrid teaching. Some sessions must be on campus and therefore we need to make that clear well in advance. Other sessions can be online only and even campus students will join the session from their own laptops. Maybe some sessions can be hybrid but we need to work hard to make them truly inclusive and collaborative. Hybrid sounds like the best of both worlds but can so easily be messy and a disappointment for all. The solution is to decide on the best format for the group you want to be involved. There is no default in the future - decide the optimal format each time.  

This isn’t an argument against physical meetings, but rather a plea that we avoid drifting back to them. The familiar rhythms of seminars and conferences feel intensely alluring after the isolation and suffering which have characterised the last eighteen months. However, do we really want to return to a situation where they are the default? Or could we imagine an approach to academic events which recognises how these options (face-to-face, hybrid, digital) are equally worthwhile depending on what we’re trying to achieve?