Online Conferences

A lot of conferences are cancelling or going online. Based on years of work with CMC (California Math Council) I did from 2014–2018 as well as fully online classes for 7 years, here are some things I’ve learned that both set expectations and make the best experience.

Don’t try to present online like your in person presentation.

I’ve seen some amazing in-person presenters who fall flat online, or the reverse — some folks are amazing online with with an in-person audience fall flat! Take advantage of the medium but also realize writing on a whiteboard can be… tedious at best.

Including video clips etc throughout your presentation can go great as long as the audience both expects them and it’s a seamless transition from your presentation to the video. I recommend downloading short clips instead of relying on youtube both because of the ads but also for reliability.

I’ve found in terms of presentations in general it’s good always have a trademark. Steve Jobs had “One more thing…” etc, but people knew it was coming and looked forward to it. When presenting online it’s your chance to have people hone in on what makes you unique because in many ways it’s a more intimate experience. In college I would include pictures of mice doing funny things on the bottom corner of most of my presentations. Sadly I did this for several years actually but only had one or two professors multiple times so everyone just thought I was doing it to be weird. Fellow students knew it was a strange personal brand — but it was effective at holding attention when I went to the next slide. I wouldn’t do this now, but the point is if I was presenting online it’s going to feel less formal than a normal industry presentation, if you come across as too serious it’s just strange.

Tools I have used and although they were novel in 2014 are quite commonplace now — twitter of course, live video, recapping through a summary service (I like wakelet now; used to use storify), collecting blogs from others at the conference, and of course a stable conference platform — many such mobile platforms exist and instead of listing the conference room, why not show the livestream link?

Participation options are key!

We‘ve all attended a webinar and done other tasks in the background while it’s running. While that can happen even at in-person conferences, the goal is to make it less and in fact, I feel it can be more engaging then in-person. Backchannel tools such as Padlet can enhance both the note-taking and audience participation for a session and lead to further conversations. As a presenter, you’re presenting because you’re passionate about the topic and better know a lot… so you usually WANT to be asked questions and online tools are often better at this than in-person venues, where folks might not want to ask a question for lack of feeling dumb etc. I know when I taught from 7th grade to college, the shy kids were often the ones who benefited most from moving a discussion online because they didn’t have to compete to be the loudest.

However, there will be an audience that just wants a link to watch the video and not have to participate in the other methods — support those users too.

Tools: Sched, GDocs, Padlet

Focus your content

I remember once hearing a college administrator say something along the lines of “we can have one professor teaching multiple sections because it’s all the same course content!” While on the surface this is true, anyone in those classes is in it for the feedback from the professor. Same thing here — sure you could have more sessions than an in-person session would allow, but the rate of diminishing returns is there as well. As a presenter I’d rather be live-presenting to a crowd of 500 rather than a live crowd of 5 hoping i’ll get hundreds of views in recordings (you won’t).

Tools: Vimeo, facebook/instagram/periscope(twitter) live. Slack

Release the Presentations immediately

Having people follow along in your presentation is a great way to build rapport with your virtual audience as well as allow them to take notes in it and be able to better understand what you’re saying and it’s implications. A link to download the presentation is one thing, but even better offer it ahead of time and let them come to the presentation to put the focus on the QA and nuance of a live presentation.

If you have the presentation done already… get it in the hands of your audience as soon as you can so they can forward it to their colleagues in the moment with why it was so amazing.

Tools: Sched, google drive, website

COVID-19 is going to change a lot of things in the future… but I do hope that conferences will remain! Nothing can replace the face to face conversations and random conversations… but there is still a way to get the learning and community to happen!