By Lucy Berthoud
At the end of April 2020 I was planning to go to the IEEE Educon, a 4 day conference focussed on Engineering Education. The IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) is a series of conferences that rotate among central locations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It was to be held in Porto, Portugal. But, at the last minute due to COVID-19, the organisers had to pivot (I am loving the use of the word ‘pivot’ everywhere, aren’t you?) and put the conference online. I wanted to share a little about my first experience of an online conference for those who might be contemplating joining one themselves.
How was it run?
Shifting the conference from actual to online, just a month before it was due, must have meant a huge amount of work behind the scenes. The organisers used Cisco Webex as the platform, setting up each of the parallel sessions with a room code. The platform seemed very stable, but hopping between sessions was logistically quite difficult. You could ask questions live, by chat, you could vote and there was a nice groups/whiteboard facility which was used very creatively in some workshops on the first day.
The terror of being a presenter
As a presenter, I was asked to upload a narrated powerpoint file and a pdf of my slides a couple of weeks in advance (the paper had been sent in two months before the conference), but I was expected to present my 10min talk live. This model worked fairly smoothly as if the presenter was having technical difficulties or didn’t turn up (this happened surprisingly frequently) then either the pdf or the video of the talk could be shown.
I was quite worried about presenting live from my little attic with my desktop pc and a webcam. But when I saw that many presenters and moderators were presenting from bedrooms, lounges and laptops, I felt embarrassed that I was so relatively well equipped! The actual presentation went smoothly mostly because I had dropped into an IT support room that the organisers had provided. This enabled me to check out in advance that everything was working. I saw some presenters who would have benefited from speaking more slowly and clearly, not reading out the text on the slides and interacting with their audience a bit more (basically all the normal things that we like and don’t like about presentations).
Should I go?
So, was it worth it? Apparently only 50 of the roughly 450 attendees dropped out of the conference when it went online. It was certainly worthwhile to hear some of the presentations and to be inspired by exciting ideas that others are trying. It was also rewarding to present the University of Bristol’s exciting work in engineering education (see more here). However, in terms of meeting people in your area and finding out informally about other practitioner’s research, it was definitely a poor relation of a “f2f” conference. F2f – three symbols which represent such an important, difficult to define and precious experience which I greatly missed.