The virtual conference

Synopsis
Peter, Associate Professor with the Faculty of Education, gives his Masters students a taste of academic and professional life, with the virtual conference.

Description
Peter Albion uses open source conference management software to set up and run a virtual conference in which students present, review and debate their papers. Students each submit an extended abstract of a paper for review, and then review a submission of a peer. Papers are completed following the reviews and then submitted for the online conference which is conducted using asynchronous discussion boards.

Target audience
The conference forms the module Contemporary Education Issues (FET 8662) within the Masters programme. It usually has about 20-30 students participating.

Learning goals and objectives
It's designed to give students an authentic conference experience, submitting proposals, papers and reviews in much the same way as in professional conferences. It gives the students an opportunity to gauge their own work against other students' work. It also gives them an independent learning opportunity to focus on an area of interest in depth. Peter finds it a convenient way of doing this as it's easy to administer.

Roles
Peter did the initial technical work, and once it was set up, he found that it virtually ran itself for most of the semester, with involvement from Peter as course examiner and conference manager mostly being confined to the beginning and end of the semester. By the nature pf the conference, students themselves take on more responsible roles as they guide their own study and help others with their work.

Results
The conference works well, and the quality of the work submitted shows improvement following the peer reviews. The atmosphere is one of the professional sharing of ideas and constructive criticism – students feel their work has been aired and are motivated by the reviews to improve it. If they decide to submit to a professional conference, it is already a familiar process. Many do go on to submit to professional conferences, and some of the papers have attracted the interest of outside parties, resulting in job offers and recognition in the field.

Problems and advice
There weren't any real problems, but because he likes things to work well, Peter changed some parts of the open-sourced program to work precisely in the way that he wanted it to work. The only other issue is dealing with students' expectations and preparing them for the apparent lull in course activity in the middle of the semester when they are preparing their papers for submission to the conference.

General recommendations
Peter says similar conferences could work very well in different subject areas, both from staff and student points of view, providing a focus on professional communication between the students.