I have two online conferences on my scheduled and as a retired academic I think it likely this will be the way I continue my own professional development. For me, the online conference is now to some extent a financial matter. When I was still working, I supported the majority of the majority of my professional travel, but at least I was subsidized. Retired academics, emeritus of not, don’t continue to receive this perk.
I have written about the future of the academic conference before, but the present post was prompted by this post in Tech & Learning. Much of the content that that post focuses on the ISTE conference which is one I have already sent in my money to experience remotely in a few months. I would add one insight to the commentary provided by this author, online access allows a user to take in more presentations. Here is the problem I constantly found with the face to face version of ISTE. ISTE is a very large conference and the interest in many sessions often exceeds the capacity of the room and what is probably a fire code. An ISTE worker is stationed at the door to cut off admission when this capacity has been exceeded. In anticipation of this problem, participants line up outside rooms to gain admission when seats from the preceding session exist the room. This often meant that when you left one session and headed to the next you would arrive too late to be admitted. This resulted in two inefficiencies – staying in a room listening to sessions for which I had only moderate interest in order to listen to a session for which I had high interest or skipping every other session to make certain I would have a set for the sessions I really wanted to watch. No problems of this type exist when you participate online.
There are clearly disadvantages. I like to ask questions at the end of sessions or after a session. While those software supporting online access have attempted to find ways to provide some type of interaction with speakers or other attendees, these approaches have a long way to go in terms of the technology and the conventions that would make this effective.