In terms of meeting length my impression is that if one travels several hours or more to a conference site, then 3 or 4 days is good since the length justifies the travel time. For zoom conferences, it seems harder to me to stay focused after 3 hours on zoom per day. So multiple days of 3-4 hours virtual talks seem useful. What are your experiences and preferences?
Ideally, 10-15 minutes per presenter is good. A session should have 4 speakers, making it 1 hour per session. A break of 5-10 minutes between sessions would be ideal.
I believe colleges and universities have it right with 50 minute and 75 minute classes for daytime classes without a break. I believe you could do three 75 minute sessions with two 15 minute breaks for 255 minutes or a little over 4 hours. This could be done twice a day, same content, to make it convenient for those with a morning or afternoon commitment, and it would serve well for those who want to attend both for reinforcement. It could also be done with three fifty minute sessions and 10 minute breaks, for a total of 3 hours. Still done twice a day. I think three fifty minute sessions would be great.
The key to choosing a structure is the content. Dense content should have shorter sessions. Lighter content should have longer sessions. But not to exceed 75 minutes each. 2 or 3 together on a topic a day, perhaps done twice in one day. No reason to ignore what is already done so widely in education.
Each session should cover a small number of topics, between two and four with three as optimal. So, each day should have three sessions of content with each session covering three topics for a total of nine topics each day. The structure is important because people absorb content better if they have a framework to put it in. The first session of a day should provide an overview of nine topics to be covered in three sessions. And the beginning of each session should provide an overview of the three topics for that session.
Online conferences needs variety of presenters to reduce boredom and maintain focus for the people attending. I personally get tired watching the computer after one and half hours. Human focal vision is around 160 degrees, the computer makes a very acute focal vision of 20 degrees this is what makes me tired easily. So, we can have two presentations in a day with so may breaks.
Dear Prof. Tainer!
This is an excellent question. I think it depends on the people involved and the topic discussed. Still 2-3 days online conferences are nice with 30-40 minute sessions and brakes (5 - 10 minutes) between them. May I argue that a conference each day should leave some free time for t he rest of the day: 3-5 contact hours per day is okay. I have attended recently an Elsevier online conference and they implemented the event in this manner:
"International Diamond Open Access Journals Conference" 13-15 April 2021:
please see details at: https://www.elsevier.com/events/conferences/international-diamond-open-access-journals-conference
A found also an article related to this issue, a case-study:
Maria Haji‐Georg et al. (2021). Academic conferencing in 2020: A virtual conference model, Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2021, Open access: Article Academic conferencing in 2020: A virtual conference model
Yours sincerely, Bulcsu Szekely
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