My husband had to hurredly prepare a two hour teaching session yesterday to stand in for a colleague stuck in the Azores because of the European flight cancellations. There must be thousands of people in similar situations especially in Europe but also around the world if an event involves travelling Europeans. It’s at times like this that the benefits of virtual conferencing seem so obvious. The set up does not have to be elaborate and can be in place within 5 minutes wherever there is an adequate broadband connection. Ensuring that the correct ports are open may take longer for a heavily protected system if permission needs to be sought and approved.
However the practice is not widespread yet and is surrounded by a great deal of mystique. I have helped my husband to give two virtual presentations to conferences in North America in the last couple of years.
The organisers really wanted his input but in one instance he would barely have had time to return from one location before setting off for the States while in the second instance I think nobody was prepared to pay his travel expenses.
I suggested giving a virtual presentation. The immediate worry was the stability of the connection to enable the showing of slides. Being a scientist, my husband generally wants to show tables, graphs and diagrams. But there are many ways to skin a rabbit so it was not really a problem to set up a solution with a couple of back-up options if these went wrong.
In both cases we tried out the connection and the showing of the slides beforehand with the conference organisers. This is essential to put both the speaker and the organisers at ease.
In both cases the presentation went smoothly.
In both cases my husband bemoaned the fact that there was no opportunity for questions at the end. However I think that was more psychological than real. I suspect that the tension had built up so greatly that both parties were just grateful that the presentation had happened and immediately wanted to relax. There is no reason why there can’t be interaction with the audience as well. So the next time a virtual presentation is looming I will build in consideration of audience participation.
I think that this solution is platform agnostic. There are many tools which can be used and while I might veto some, I certainly have no strong preferences. In fact a conference organisation may have their own preferences.
All this was done from home using free versions of conferencing tools. So if the altenative is a £3300 taxi journey then it might be worth considering virtual conferencing instead! My rates are very reasonable!