Virtual Research Events and Conferences

• Virtual Conferences: A Guide to Best Practices – The Association for Computing Machinery task force report provides concrete advice for events of all sizes, including the tasks required of organizers, specific platforms that can be used and financial considerations.
  They also host a discussion forum for conference organizers to share experiences and discuss issues.
• How to Run a Free Online Academic Conference – This comprehensive “workbook” provides questions that virtual conference organizers should be asking while planning an online academic event.
• Moving Ideas, Without Moving People – Prior to COVID-19 the University of Alberta developed a toolkit to support virtual conferencing in an effort to reduce the carbon footprint related to academic events.
• Recommendations for Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online – This guide developed for teaching carpentries reviews many considerations relevant to a wide variety of online workshops.
• A nearly carbon-neutral conference model white paper and practical guide – This practical guide was created based on 5-years of experience delivering nearly carbon-neutral virtual conferences.
• For large or complex events, groups may also opt to utilize event management services. A list of U of T approved vendors, in the category of event staging services is available through the U of T procurement services supplier directory.

Specific advice for transitioning in-person events to online:

• Webinar Recording: UTSC Academic Advising and Career Centre. This webinar highlights learning outcomes, activities and technologies used to successful transitioning a 3-day conference online.
• Webinar Recording: The Main E-vent | Going Online: Steps to Moving Events and Activities Online. This webinar focuses on how to migrate in-person activities to successful and valuable virtual ones.
• Going Viral: Taking Your Conference Online for COVID-19. This Inside HigherEd article provides lessons learned on transitioning to virtual events.
• Webinar Recording: Running an Online Conference: Insights from LAK20. The Society for Learning Analytics Research share their experience transitioning an international conference to an online format.
• Virtual and Valued: A review of the Success and a Few Failures of the Creation, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Inaugural Virtual Conferences and Monthly webinars. This paper explains how a group of librarians from different institutions worked to plan, market, implement, and evaluate monthly webinars as well as an inaugural online conference, despite never meeting in person.
• Broadening Participation in Scientific Conferences during the Era of Social Distancing. This paper describe the successes and failures of a hybrid in-person/virtual conference mode.
• Organizing Virtual Conferences through Mirrors: The ACM e-Energy 2020 Experience. This paper advocates a mirror program approach for academic conferences. More specifically, executing conference in multiple parallel (mirrored) programs, so that each mirror program can fit a different time zone.