Developing the Developers - Supporting Development of Online Conference Presentations

Delivering online tuition has become standard practice in most universities with many students receiving part of their tuition online. However, so far there appears to be a resistance to utilising online delivery for staff and academic development. An online academic development conference was delivered to 150 teaching staff delegates over the course of a week. The conference structure was to have a keynote presentation and eleven shorter discussion presentations, each with their own dedicated asynchronous discussion forum. Conference presenters were each asked to produce a video presentation of up to 7 minutes and run an associated online forum. This paper reports on the experience of the presenters in producing their video presentations and running the forums. It will highlight the valuable development opportunity for presenters as well as summarising their experiences. Finally it will outline the lessons we have learnt and propose some recommendations for others considering running online staff development conferences.