{"id":10566,"date":"2020-09-30T09:20:52","date_gmt":"2020-09-30T15:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bridge.edu\/tefl\/blog\/?p=10566"},"modified":"2026-03-04T12:02:02","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T19:02:02","slug":"elt-conferences-go-virtual-is-this-the-future-for-industry-events","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bridge.edu\/tefl\/blog\/elt-conferences-go-virtual-is-this-the-future-for-industry-events\/","title":{"rendered":"ELT Conferences Go Virtual: Is This the Future for Industry Events?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Each year there are an estimated<\/span> 80 or more ELT\u00a0(English Language Teaching)\u00a0conferences across the globe. They come in all shapes and sizes. Many are grassroots events organized by teachers volunteering time in their community, and many are affiliated with international associations or the initiative of local universities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The largest events put on annually by industry heavyweights like TESOL International Organization<\/a> and IATEFL<\/a> (International Association of Teaching English as a Foreign Language) attract upwards of 4,000 delegates from all over the globe. With a reputation to engage large audiences, these conferences also attract hundreds of exhibitors, including publishing giants such as Pearson, MacMillan, Oxford, Cambridge, and National Geographic.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These English teaching conferences serve an important purpose and are cherished by teachers worldwide as a source of networking and professional development<\/a>. TEFL\/TESOL conferences offer innovative ideas, concepts, and research that are not necessarily learned on the job.<\/span><\/p>\n

This year, these important events, much like those of other industries, were upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many organizations have been able to transition their events online. We seek to learn more about this new phenomenon and the pros and cons of the online format as well as if online TEFL\/TESOL conferences<\/a> are here to stay.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Split decisions and scrambling\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

In an effort to honor domestic and international health protocols, many English teaching conference organizers also faced a dilemma: transition their large-scale events to an online platform or defer until a later date in an effort to maintain in-person engagement. Recognizing that neither alternative was ideal, a race against the clock ensued.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Association of Colombian English Professors<\/span><\/a> [<\/span>Asociaci\u00f3n Colombiana de Profesores de Ingl\u00e9s <\/span><\/i>(ASOCOPI)] is a nonprofit organization focused on English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals in Colombia. Because the organization operates on government grants, donors, and partnerships, they plan their annual October conference six months in advance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The conference is always an in-person experience hosted at various universities in Colombia and sometimes in neighboring countries. In March of 2020, just as ASOCOPI began putting program pieces in motion, COVID-19 cases were sprouting uncontrollably in the Eastern hemisphere. University president Carlo Granados Beltr\u00e1n had second thoughts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A

A presentation at the 2019 TESOL Colombia conference.<\/p><\/div>\n

Over in England, Jon Burton, the Chief Executive of the International Association of Teaching English as Foreign Language (IATEFL), was in a similar situation and had to make a split decision. On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel\u00a0coronavirus, a global pandemic; the U.K. ban of all social public gatherings immediately followed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

IATEFL\u2019s <\/span>54<\/span>th<\/span> International Conference and Exhibition<\/span><\/a>, an event that reels in 3,000 participants, on average, was bookmarked on people\u2019s calendars for mid-March. What now?<\/span><\/p>\n

Burton and the IATEFL team needed to thoroughly weigh all options and with haste. \u201cDid we want to cancel our conference?\u201d he reflected. \u201cWhat would that mean? How would that look, and what were the alternatives?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not experts\u2026 so we decided to go for trial and error, hosting online webinars ahead of the conference, seeing how people are reacting to this kind of event.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout April and May, Beltr\u00e1n, along with his team, honored the government\u2019s shelter-in-place directives, monitored virus cases in Colombia, and contemplated alternatives for ASOCOPI\u2019s 55<\/span>th<\/span> Annual Conference.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBy late May, we decided to move the conference online,\u201d says Beltr\u00e1n.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The association is starting from scratch since this is their first large-scale online assembly, ever. But they keep their teacher-based constituency top of mind, constantly exploring new avenues to guarantee a seamless October event.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not experts\u2026 so we decided to go for trial and error, hosting online webinars ahead of the conference, seeing how people are reacting to this kind of event.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the decision to move this year\u2019s conference completely online, Beltr\u00e1n\u2019s team is relying on the reputation and the quality of past events to generate roughly the same number of attendees this October.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zoom, anyone?<\/b><\/h3>\n

We now know some TEFL\/TESOL associations are transferring their conferences online and teachers are embracing the change, but how exactly are they doing it? What platforms have been the most successful? Is virtual the modality of the future?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Take, for instance, the Troika Xperience conference, hosted by Troika<\/a>, an education start-up based in Brazil. Maintaining a start-up mentality and spearheaded by co-founder and president Vinicius\u00a0Nobre, the Troika enterprise planned and executed its first-ever medium-sized conference in just under two months. In the midst of the pandemic, Troika not only threw their first conference in the company\u2019s history but also their first online conference.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For Nobre, an experienced language education professional, Google Meet eclipses all other platforms. Past webinars and smaller virtual meetings were held on the service, so Nobre and his team didn\u2019t see the incentive to change direction and opt for the more popular platforms, like Zoom, for their July 2020 conference.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle Meet is very reliable,\u201d Nobre says. \u201cWe don\u2019t use Zoom because for us, for the number of events we hold, it would be too big of an investment.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the contrary, Beltr\u00e1n will use Zoom for ASOCOPI 2020, as opposed to more affordable options like Facebook Live or Google Meet. The association typically hosts 300 to 400 people for the face-to-face conference, and they\u2019re banking on similar registration numbers come October. In this case, Zoom has the capabilities to support hundreds of attendees, the speakers, and the staffers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

ASOCOPI will continue using Whova, an events management application based in San Diego, which launched in 2013 but gained popularity in recent years with clients like Duke University, L\u2019Or\u00e9al, and Pfizer. ASOCOPI favors this application for sudden changes to the event schedule that require a quick but neat response.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The upside of implementing Whova for virtual conferences is that attendees won\u2019t need to receive five back-to-back emails every time the schedule is pushed back; instead, the updates will appear directly in the app. The downside, however, is that attendees will actually have to download the app to their mobile device, even if only for three days.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TESOL Director of Strategic Events, Lisa Dyson, CMP, DES, evaluated a myriad of virtual platform options in a short span of time and decided to go with Meeting Play when pivoting from their in-person March convention to a virtual setting in July.\u00a0MeetingPlay is a mobile event app and event technology solutions company that prides itself on key features: event registration platforms and indoor wayfinding solutions (think gamification and augmented reality capabilities found on the Pok\u00e9mon Go mobile app).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dyson had been a strong advocate of incorporating virtual elements into a convention even before COVID-19 hit. She is even certified in planning virtual events. As a well-known and respected leader in the meetings industry, Dyson explains, \u201cYou need to be nimble. The events industry has been stagnant for a while. Covid-19 is pushing the events industry to evolve and perhaps in a better way, to new levels. We all wish to return to in-person live events, but since this is the new norm, we have to adapt and we, at TESOL, had to adapt quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although MeetingPlay was able to support TESOL\u2019s 4,000 virtual participants, 500 secular and concurrent pre-recorded sessions, and over twenty virtual exhibitors, it was not without gripes. Rosa Aronson, interim Executive Director of TESOL International Association, was elated to find out the platform was easy enough to navigate, specifically for the attendees, but she and her team needed more administrative control. Those last-minute hiccups that occur at every organized event proved to be a pain point for Aronson, who had limited abilities to make direct changes through MeetingPlay.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, this is not about the technology\u2026 this is about the people.\u201d <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite all the innovative software designed specifically for large online conferences, the team at Troika sees value in people over technology. Nobre, naturally optimistic, scrappy, and historically successful\u00a0with minimal resources, challenges the idea of sophisticated digital technology just to host an international English teaching conference. All those bells and whistles, which are usually costly, may not even matter to the audience. Instead, Troika Xperience is driven by the quality of relations that participants build at their events.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, this is not about the technology\u2026 this is about the people,\u201d Nobre says. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to have cutting-edge technology in order to organize an event\u2026 you need to focus on the people. Who are these people? What do they want? How can they play a major part in the process?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These questions will rotate through the minds of event organizers should virtual conferencing become the new norm these next few years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The expo floor versus the expo tab<\/b><\/h3>\n

Traditionally, one of the more alluring attractions for in-person conference attendees is scoping out the latest products and services at exhibitor booths. The displays are often vibrant, with eager representatives standing at the ready with discount codes, and hands-on product sampling is typically a visitor magnet. If the exhibitor has a generous budget, small gift bags usually find their way into the hands of future customers. So how can all that be achieved virtually?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Expo

The bustling expo hall at the 2019 Global English Education China Assembly.<\/p><\/div>\n

Rikka Batulan, Head of Exhibits and Strategic Events at TESOL, needed to answer this exact question in less than four months, just in time for the first TESOL Virtual Convention.<\/span><\/p>\n

The solution materialized in two ways. The first was to allocate two hours of each conference day to \u201cExpo Hours.\u201d During these hours, attendees were free to explore the exhibits worry-free of missing a scheduled session. The second way was to host virtual exhibitor booths. Each exhibitor was supported with a profile page equipped with videos, downloadable materials, and a discussion board for attendees. Although the booth reps couldn\u2019t physically hand out freebies or snacks, they were \u201con-call\u201d to answer attendees\u2019 questions via chat boxes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What proved to be a success with the TESOL virtual booths was exhibitors could easily measure their engagement metrics for future online marketing campaigns.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the exhibitor side, we had instant click reports that they can download and see who\u2019s visited their virtual booth, which to them was a huge plus so they could keep in contact with them post-convention,\u201d says Batulan.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Major adjustments ahead\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

What Troika desired most for Troika Xperience attendees was to emulate an atmosphere of community, as if the COVID-19 pandemic never occurred and the conference was held in person. Across the board, representatives from ASOCOPI, IATEFL, and TESOL concurred: Nothing replaces an in-person conference. The face-to-face engagement, networking, and community building are simply unmatched.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDesigning the whole experience was quite a challenge because we wanted to find different elements that would make people feel part of a community and engage with one another,\u201d says Nobre.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, \u201cZoom fatigue\u201d is real. So, Troika tried to stray as far away as possible from making the online English teaching conference feel like a full eight-hour day of online webinars, which is why all the sessions were equipped with active \u201cminders.\u201d Minders were essentially virtual ushers. Attendees were welcomed when they entered a session, and informed of upcoming sessions in the schedule, including virtual coffee breaks, which were in designated networking \u201crooms.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Another challenge to address: slow responses to attendees\u2019 questions. At an in-person event, eyeing a staffer in a \u201cVolunteer\u201d T-shirt is followed by a simple (or sometimes complex) question. An immediate answer is expected. How long would responses take in a virtual chat setting?<\/span><\/p>\n

TESOL attendee, Daniel Isozaki, dispatched a simple question via a chat box about video access upon the convention\u2019s close, but his inquiry was met with silence. He eventually figured out the answer to his question by poking around the TESOL site. He\u2019d missed a presentation, so he was relieved to discover pre-recorded sessions were available for review up to 60 days after the last day of the online English teaching conference.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The last, and perhaps the most obvious, concern web organizers anticipate is the urgent scrambling that follows after an Internet failure. In a new era where video conferencing is indispensable, Nobre says it is imperative to have plans B and C for technical issues.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We are social beings\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

Anzhela Karamysheva\u2019s first TEFL\/TESOL conference ever was the TESOL Virtual Convention in July. Off the heels of completing a Bridge teacher training course, she was excited to continue learning and developing. Nothing about the online platform discouraged her.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s better to continue to hold the conference even if it\u2019s all online,\u201d she says.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rory Falls, based in Los Angeles, attended the TESOL Virtual Convention as well and found very little to complain about.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI loved the online format because often events like this are on the other side of the country or in a different country and can be hard to attend,\u201d Falls says. \u201cThis allowed me to participate without having that limiting boundary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When Bridge spoke to TESOL and Troika, they shared that attendee feedback was consistent with Falls\u2019. Virtual platforms welcome untapped audiences due to convenience and low costs for the attendees.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAttendees outside the U.S. were very excited for the opportunity to attend a TESOL convention for the first time.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAttendees outside the U.S. were very excited for the opportunity to attend a TESOL convention for the first time,\u201d says Srisucha McCabe, TESOL\u2019s Strategic Events Manager, who originally planned for an in-person conference in Denver. \u201cThey were excited to interact with well-known speakers, authors, and board members.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, IATEFL opted to defer the March 2020 conference to June 2021. The justification was simple. Every year, a week after the year\u2019s conference ends, the association begins planning for the following year. It\u2019s an 11-month process. For Burton, the speakers, members, and staff put a lot of work into 2020\u2019s conference, and that needed to be preserved for 2021 so that all stakeholders could enjoy IATEFL in its purest form: live and in-person.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Plus, IATEFL already hosts a collection of online webinars, courses, and professional skills workshops scattered throughout the year, including an added web conference on October 3, 2020, in partnership with the British Council, to celebrate World Teachers’ Day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe very much recognize the importance of online conferences\u2026 but we also see the value of face-to-face events as well because of the networking, and because of the ability of people to be in the same room and ask their questions,\u201d Burton says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Beltr\u00e1n, Batulan, McCabe, and Aronson agree with this sentiment and are forecasting how to structure future events\u2026 perhaps a hybrid forum (half in person, half remote) is the way of the future. It\u2019s still too early to tell, and it will all depend on how quickly the world manages COVID-19.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nobre from Troika sees TEFL\/TESOL conferences, once safe enough, returning to full physical attendance. Conventional wisdom tells us why: We are social beings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bridge is dedicated to empowering a global community of English teachers. Learn more by visiting us at bridge.edu.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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