New Directions online conference

Description

An online conference delivered on a improvised platform using CMS technology provided by Tata Consutancy Services to respond to the COVID pandemic by rapidly moving a face-to-face conference online.

Objective

In the spring of 2020 the annual two-day British Council New DIrections East Asia language assessment conference was being planned to be held in a hotel in Singapore. As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread across the globe and country after country went into lockdown, it becme clear that the face to face event would not be going ahead. In response to this, as project manager for the event, I devised a delivery plan to hold the event in its entirity online.

Build

In the early days of the pandemic, it is easy to forget that online meeting and online events, were relatively uncommon. People preferred face to face and were unsure of the reliability of online technology for meeting. I worked with partners at TCS to devise a plan to use a CMS they had developed for online learning to act as the event platform. Inside the CMS it was possible to create separate areas where video content could be streamed and online discussions could be had in forums. We created one such area for each strand of the conference where the presentations that made up that theme would be streamed. There was also an area for the plenary room, where the keynote talks would be delivered. To stream the content, I initially was keen on using Adobe Connect because of its multi-feature interface. However, on testing this product with colleagues it became clear that the reliability was questionable and that it would create a steep learning curve for users. Instead, we went with the zoom platform to deliver the video content, which proved itself to be reliable and robust on testing.

Challenges

Registration was done through the regular event registration platform, and therefore we had to transfer the attendee data to the CMS and create unique logins for the users and communciate this to them individually. This was time consuming but ultimately there were no issues. There was a relatively strict log in timeout on the CMS platform, which meant users had to log in more often than they liked and caused a few complaints. To help users navigate the platform, video explainers were created. Overall, the users were able to navigate the platform well. The discussion function was underused however.

Learnings

We created initial posts to encourage users to use the discussion forum, however there was little discussion. This was really a ground-breaking project and the concept would have been entirely new to most of the attendees, so it perhaps is to be expected that there would have been hesitation to interact in the forums. We recruited moderators for each room from our internal pool of staff and they did a great job. Communicating to them the expectations and the format of the sessions was extremely important. We did that well and they did a great job. It really lent to the success of the event.

Result

In the field we were working in this was the only conference to move online during 2020. As mentioned, it is sometimes easy to forget that time and the challenges everyone faced in adapting to the new normal. I remember the zoom sales representative I spoke to saying that their head was spinning because of the massive demand that they were experiencing and were not immediately equipped to deal with. The following year we contracted with Cvent who had by then developed an excellent event platform, but in 2020 platforms of that sophistication were not available. I remain proud of the inginuety of the CMS platform we put together for this event and the event itself which brought enjoyment and connection to the community during a difficult time.

Reference

Video demonstrating to attendees how to use the platform: https://youtu.be/GDALRSVecO4?feature=shared