Can Online Academic Conferences Replace Offline Conferences?

In early 2020, an unexpected epidemic swept the world, grounding approximately 90% of international flights worldwide and causing approximately 80% of domestic and international academic conferences to be postponed or converted to online. Based on historical data, it is estimated that about 20 million academic conferences will be rescheduled (cancelled, postponed or online) in 2020 due to the epidemic. Especially for the computer science and medicine disciplines, where there are more conferences, there are countless conferences that have been postponed, cancelled or changed to online due to the epidemic, and these conferences cover a time frame from early February 2020 to even the end of 2020. Can online academic conferences replace traditional offline conferences?

Undoubtedly, academic conferences provide an opportunity for scholars and master’s and doctoral students from different regions of the world in the same field to communicate and get to know each other, and also promote academic exchange and collision of ideas to a certain extent. However, under the background of the current global epidemic outbreak, most of the academic conferences finally decided to change to online conferences, except for a few academic conferences that were postponed. So, can online academic conferences really replace traditional offline conferences?

1.The Benefits of participating in academic conferences

As a bridge for scholars in the same industry to share research results, exchange technologies and get to know each other and establish connections, academic conferences play an important role in promoting scientific and technological development and technology exchange. Generally speaking, the significance of participating in academic conferences can be summarized as follows:

Making presentation and getting feedback from Participants. For participants of academic conferences, especially for master and doctoral students, the primary purpose of participating in academic conferences is to present their research results, discuss and exchange with their peers about the paper, and make the article be included in the published proceedings.
Listening to presentations and collision of ideas. In addition to presenting their own papers, attendees can attend and listen to Keynote presentations, various Tutorial presentations, and other participants’ presentations, which will open up their academic horizons and inspire them.
The conference is a great opportunity to get to know each other and to socialize academically. The Coffee Break and other Social Events outside the conference are a great opportunity for participants, especially for graduate students, to get to know each other and establish connections with their peers (especially, the big names in the field).

2.Pros and Cons of Online Conferences

In recent years, with the maturity of online teleconferencing technology, there are more and more calls to reduce the number of offline academic conferences and organize online academic conferences. In particular, according to news reports: some scholars have used carbon footprints to measure the carbon emissions of a participant in an international academic conference (just the carbon emissions of round-trip flights) as 360kg, and estimate that a large amount of carbon emissions are generated globally every year because of travel to academic conferences, which will accelerate global warming to some extent. Therefore, the concept of online academic conferences for energy saving and environmental protection has been recognized by more and more scholars. In particular, the impact of the epidemic has accelerated the transition from offline academic conferences to online academic conferences.

Currently, for most conference organizers, the main reasons for choosing to change offline conferences to online conferences are multiple: 1) the timeliness of article publication. If the conference is postponed, the authors of accepted articles will not be able to present their papers on schedule, which will directly affect the publication time of the conference papers, which will have a greater impact on the graduation of master’s and doctoral students and participants who need papers to evaluate their titles. 2) The end time of the epidemic cannot be accurately predicted. The development of the epidemic cannot be accurately predicted, and the postponement time is still uncertain, especially since some participants may still have concerns even after the epidemic. 3) Online conference technology is mature. The current online meetings have matured and various online meeting platforms (Zoom, Microsoft Team, Skype, Tencent Meeting, etc.) are mushrooming, which provides a strong technical guarantee for online meetings to be held.

The author has already also attended an online academic conference at the end of March, so here is an attempt to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of online academic conferences based on his own experience of attending online conferences.

Pros: 1) Not limited by location. Although all conference presentations and paper presentations can be conducted through online conferences, parallel sessions are also organized through virtual conference Channels, regardless of the location of the participants. 2) Beneficial to the environment. Online conferences reduce the need for participants to travel, which will largely reduce carbon emissions from air travel and other means of transportation, thus contributing to environmental protection. 3) Cost savings. For the shy groups, especially the master and doctoral students in laboratories with insufficient research funds, it can help them (especially the non-presenting spectator participants) to save the conference expenses to a certain extent and help them to attend more conferences.
Cons: 1) Online virtual meetings do not allow for face-to-face communication among participants. The online virtual meetings do not allow the participants to feel the “atmosphere” of attending the conference, especially for the graduate students who have just started their research career. 2) The participants cannot communicate deeply and get to know each other and establish connections. Due to the online conference, the organizer cannot effectively organize social activities and face-to-face communication during the break, which prevents the participants from getting to know each other more deeply and thus does not help to establish a long-lasting relationship in the future. 3) The short time of the day for the conference and the shortened presentation time for each person. In particular, for international academic conferences, because participants are in different time zones around the world, it is not possible to find a longer time slot in the day to hold the conference that suits everyone, so only 5-6 hours of sessions can be held each day.

3.Can online academic conferences replace traditional offline meetings?

So can online meetings really replace traditional offline meetings, and is there a big difference between the experience of online and offline meetings from the attendees’ perspective? Recently, the organizers of the EDBT/ICDT 2020 Joint Conference in the database field conducted a survey and analysis of the experience of more than 100 attendees of their online conference held from late March to early April, and summarized their experience in organizing the online conference, which was published in the arXiv preprint repository [5]. The following are some excerpts from their report.

What is the position and location of the online participants? Can online academic conferences replace traditional offline conferences? From the results of this survey, it is clear that the participants are mainly professors and PhD students, especially for PhD students, attending conferences is the best opportunity to meet more professors. At the same time, the participants were located in 5 continents, so the organizers of the live online conference had to consider the time difference and had to shorten the time of each day. The conference had to reduce each presentation from 20-25mins to 10-12mins, which made it possible to reduce the duration of the daily sessions to 5-6.5 hours.
Is it necessary to organize more online social events, and would you like to participate in online social events? Can online academic conferences replace traditional offline conferences? According to the results of the survey, about 50% of the attendees would like to see more social activities organized by the organizers during the online conferences. At the same time, 73% of the attendees were not willing to participate in the Bring Your Own Beer Session. This contradiction in attendees’ psychology reflects that the online social function of the online conference is far less effective than the face-to-face communication experience of the offline conference.
Will there be support for reducing carbon emissions by attending a fully online conference or an optional online/offline conference? Can online academic conferences replace traditional offline conferences? According to the results of this survey, 72.3% of participants support attending optional online conferences (organizing online + offline conferences for participants to choose) to reduce carbon emissions, while about 51.8% of participants support attending purely online conferences to reduce carbon emissions. This shows that purely online meetings will be increasingly accepted by participants, but currently participants generally support optional online+offline meetings.

4.Conclusion

From the above analysis, we can conclude that there are pros and cons of online conferences, so different people will have different opinions about them. If we look at the significance of participating in academic conferences, the most important thing is to communicate with peers, publicize one’s research results, and let peers know that one is also doing research in this area, so as to establish a foundation for future cooperation and communication, which is especially important for graduate students who have just entered the “circle”. For example, in the online conference that the teenager attended before, although the organizer tried to follow the offline conference process as much as possible, in addition to the normal conference report and paper presentation, the organizer also organized and set up a virtual “Coffee Break” conference channel and organized A group photo of the participants was taken to provide an opportunity for participants to communicate and get to know each other. However, based on what author learned in the end, not many people participated in the virtual Coffee Break, and even if they did, they found that the final experience was vastly different from the face-to-face interaction of an offline meeting. Although this epidemic may reshape the development mode of many industries and sectors, there is no doubt that the traditional academic conference format will also be affected to a certain extent. However, in author’s view, traditional offline meetings will not be replaced by online virtual meetings for a long time to come. However, in any case, virtual online meeting is still the future trend of academic conference development, and the “online + offline” meeting mode will become an important transition in the process of transitioning from traditional offline meeting to virtual online meeting.

References

[1] https://cikm2020.org/

[2] https://www.larvol.com/covid/

[3] https://2020.eswc-conferences.org/eswc-2020-virtual-conference/

[4] https://www2020.thewebconf.org/

[5] Bonifati, A., Guerrini, G., Lutz, C., Martens, W., Mazilu, L., Paton, N., Salles, M.A.V., Scholl, M.H. and Zhou, Y., 2020. holding a Conference Online and Live due to COVID-19. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.07668. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07668