As promised yesterday this is the follow up to my post on the ECEL 2015 conference. On this occasion I am reflecting on the conference through a different lense – looking at it as someone who organises conferences:
It always of interest to me how others do it – what do they do better than me and what ideas can I take back and implement in my next conference. But I also find it valuable to identify good bits that I do that they don’t. I find it somewhat reassuring and rewarding to an extent. I don’t mean that in a big headed way – it is just good to know that you are doing something right.

Pre conference:
The conference website was a great help, despite not being the most aesthetically pleasing – it contained all of the information that was required and it was relatively easy to find it. The correspondence from the organisers was also quite good, with a slight negative being sometimes there was just too much information in their emails but if I’m being honest that is probably me being a little picky. One of the things that I feel would improve the site was a little intro video from each of the mini-track chairs – explaining what their track was going to be about – essentially a little promo video. If they were really ambitious each speaker could post a video like this for their talks – easily done with todays technology

They also had pre-conference workshops – I find these incredibly useful especially if you have people travelling a long distance – it is easier to justify travelling a long way for 3 days instead of two. It also gives you an extra day to network. The downside of course is taking that extra day away from the “day job”. There were two workshops both of which proved valuable to me, for different reasons but definitely worth my while.

During the conference
There were a lot of positives about this conference; most of the talks were very good, the food was fabulous (they had a great gluten free selection), the various stream rooms were all very close to one another. The vast majority of the speakers kept to time and in general the conference ran exactly as scheduled. The conference dinner was amazing – we ate in Hatfield palace, the home of Elizabeth I, and the food was most certainly fit for royalty. A negative though would be the lack of a social element to the conference. I feel the organisers missed an opportunity here – the dinner finished at 10 and with most of the participants staying in one of two hotels, it would have been easy to put on the timetable that participants can network in the hotel bar after dinner. Even by reserving a space in the bar and doing nothing else, it may encourage networking.

The biggest frustration was the poor quality of wifi. If I was the organisers I would be asking the venue for a refund because the quality and reliability for a purpose built conference centre was very poor. Several of the presenters needed the internet to facilitate audience participation and the poor wifi simply prevented that. Luckily enough those who needed videos from Youtube or content from Prezi had back up plans but for an eLearning conference reliable wifi is an absolute must. In my opinion it seriously reduced the amount of conference traffic on twitter as well. As a conference organiser my heart went out to the conference team as all of the hard work that they had put into place was overshadowed by technical problems beyond their control. Rather than end a blog post on a bad note I want to mention two more positives; They had a big screen in the main coffee area which displayed comments, tweets and conference notifications – a really nice idea and something which I will implement in future conferences they had a notice board with the photos and names of all of the presenters displayed by the registration desk – a simple but effective tool to facilitate networking.

All in all I would like to congratulate the organisers on a job well done and I look forward to Prague next year 🙂

All in all I would like to congratulate the organisers on a job well done