Planning Online Conferences in the Arts and Social Sciences

• Project Team: Maria NitaStefanie SinclairDavid RobertsonAlison KirkbrightHeather Scott
• Subject Discipline: Social Sciences and Global Studies
• Theme: Equality, diversity and inclusionOnline and blended tuition
• Project Aim: Promotes equality diversity and inclusion including reduction of degree awarding gap
• Status: Complete
• Date: January 2021

The foci of this project is to understand best practice in (1) the delivery of online conferences; (2) promoting and hosting; and (3) engagement and inclusion. Consequently, the research questions are:

RQ1. What is best practice in the online delivery of academic conferences? How can FASS, and The OU more broadly, deliver excellent online conferences?

RQ2. How can we effectively present and promote the online conferences FASS is hosting, so that this can be of benefit to The OU as a whole?

RQ3. How can online conferences in the Arts and Social Sciences facilitate a more inclusive and impactful engagement with different publics, including students?

In the early days of COVID-19, The Open University was catapulted into the headlines as being a leader in quality online and distance education. This was closely followed by our OpenLearn platform getting an unprecedented and sustained amount of traffic with people accessing our free content. Just as we lead in these areas, we would like The Open University (The OU) to be renowned for the delivery of quality online academic conferences enhancing our reputation for academic leadership and excellence fulfilling our mission to be open to people, methods and ideas.

Furthermore, considerable time and effort goes into organising a conference, ensuring the right content and speakers etc. At present, these events appear on discipline web pages, which can be quite buried, and often don’t receive a huge amount of traffic. They can be promoted via various Faculty social channels, and academics who may be active on Twitter and other platforms. However, we would like to explore whether there are more efficient ways of promoting and hosting our conferences and how we can attract and engage wider audiences.

In terms of good practice in the delivery of online conferences, a growing number of publications offer various methods for improving online conferences in the context of the Covid-19 situation, such as by including webinars, break-out rooms and offering online posters (Seery & Flaherty, 2020). There is a recognition that improving the Online Conferences experience for attendees is linked to improving brand name (Sakas, Vlachos, & Nasiopoulos, 2016) and there is also a desire to share expertise and lessons learned. For example some authors discuss the benefits and challenges of offering pre-recorded talks and live Q&A sessions (both shorter versions to be streamed at the conference, and longer talks to make available in advance). This project will explore best practice of how to actively, creatively and inclusively engage participants in online conferences and effectively facilitate knowledge exchange that increases the impact of research and facilitates the sharing of ideas, data, experience and expertise with wider publics. It will also consider how online conferences could potentially improve and enhance the learning experience of students, for example through sharing digital outputs from conferences as teaching resources or through engaging students as participants or presenters in online conferences.