Virtual and Valued: A Review of the Successes (and a Few Failures) of the Creation, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Inaugural Virtual Conference and Monthly Webinars

Abstract

Planning and implementing online professional development opportunities is challenging but attainable. This paper explains how a group of librarians from different institutions worked to plan, market, implement, and evaluate monthly webinars as well as an inaugural online conference, despite never meeting in person. The web conferences began in-state and grew to include presenters and attendees from across the nation. A review of available web-conferencing technologies will be provided, including free and open-source options. This paper includes details about the planning process, including subcommittee collaborations, social media marketing, and day-of logistics. Failures during event planning and execution-and tips to avoid them-will be discussed, as well as next steps looking forward.

When international academic conferences go virtual

“…With many patents in the field of technologies relating to video conferencing (e.g. Nayak 2020 ) and with several major software companies based there (Peuler and McCallister 2019 ), the United States could possibly even be a typical lead market (as defined by Beise 2004 ) for video conferencing software. This leads to the third hypothesis:…”

“…Virtual conferences are also commonly seen as a solution to reduce the carbon footprints of travel to academic and business conferences (Abbott 2020 ). Many powerful web conferencing software and systems are now available (Adobe connect Webinars, WebEx Premium, GoToWebinar Seminar, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, Apache and Team Viewer) (see Peuler and McCallister 2019 for an overview). In this analysis, a conference is considered virtual when it puts some of its content in an online window or is held entirely in real time by use of video conferencing software.…”

Economic Reflections of the Transformation of Social Distance Concept in Everyday Life After Covid-19 to Virtual Contact

“…Covid-19 has also revealed that there may be a different alternative than the usual business life. Studies show that virtual conferences are more successful than in-person conferences in terms of the number of participants, and that they are more liked by the participants, and they want to continue to try in the future (Peuler & McCallister, 2018;Erickson et al, 2020). For this reason, it is important to develop virtual conferences in the dimension of social interaction (Georgi, Xu, Rosca, 2021).…”

Academic conferencing in 2020: A virtual conference model

“…Peuler and McCallister (2019) reviewed an inaugural virtual conference and found that a successful virtual conference tripled the number of attendees. Erickson, Kellogg, Shami, and Levine (2020) showed similar findings when examining two virtual conferences held in 2009.…”