Reflections on attending VicePhec from afar

VicePhec is the annual chemistry (variations in chemistry education  - VICE) and physics higher education conference (PHEC), the UK’s must go to event for anyone interested in teaching and education research.

A number of people have commented on how welcoming, varied and inclusive the conference is (you can read Kristy Turner’s description of attending with a young person in tow here).

This has been my experience too.This was the 3rd time that I have presented at the conference, although I’ve only actually attended in person once. Having severe ME makes travelling to, and attending conferences, virtually impossible. And while I thoroughly enjoyed going to last year's VicePhec in Nottingham it took me weeks to recover afterwards.

This year I presented both a talk and a poster. The talk was pre-recorded (incase we had technology issues on the day). As David Smith commented on twitter ‘Ironically, @Annakwood lecture about interactions in lectures is pre-recorded. But she is available on Skype for interaction. #ViCEPHEC16‘. Being on Skype to answer questions worked really well, especially when I made eye contact with people, though it was slightly disconcerting watching the delegates watch my presentation (were they looking bored?). One major advantage of this approach is that I was able to put the talk online, which meant that people who couldn't be at the conference, but were following along on twitter could watch it.

I’m really grateful to Ross Galloway, and the conference organisers for doing the work on the ground to make this happen.

I also tried to make my poster as interactive as possible, by including a short quiz accessed through a QR code and online before the conference. Again this generated quite a bit of interest, including from people who weren't physically at the conference.

Of course, attending a conference virtually is not the same as being there in person. Nevertheless I know that I was one of many who couldn't be there for various reasons, who were reading and interacting through the twitter feed. We are grateful to all those who were tweeting, as well as to anyone who has written a post conference blog post. There are lots of things that I want to follow-up on - the presentation by Robert Campbell on using livescribe pens to understand student reasoning, Sally Jordan et al. work on free text FCI and David Nutt (who won the poster prize) on using eye tracking.

Maybe I’ll attend in person next year. But even if I do, I wonder if there is a way to make it more open and accessible for everyone, perhaps by recording the presentations and posting online or live broadcasting the keynote lectures. Either way, if this year is anything go go by, it is likely to be a stimulating event both for those there in person and for the virtual attendees. 

Reflections on attending VicePhec from afar, by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.