Back when I was still working for the overly-large school district, I routinely attended several edtech conferences every year. That included the one produced by our state organization VSTE1, usually the huge ISTE event, and always EduCon.
But those three were the very small tip of a very large iceberg. If I had an unlimited budget, and didn’t have to do an actual job, I could have traveled to a couple hundred conferences. And far more if you included every K12 education-related meeting held in just the US.
Of course, those live meetings were completely shut down by the pandemic. Although most organizations shifted to some kind of online version of their conferences, with varying levels of success, the experience just wasn’t the same. For attendees, vendors, and the budgets of the sponsoring groups. Conferences are often big business.
So, after nearly two years in which face-to-face events requiring travel and involving hundreds of people were just not possible, what happens to education-related conferences? Once organizations are able to present live conferences again, will the crowds (and income) return?
This is something of a personal question since I am a long-time member of the conference planning committee for VSTE. Currently we are in the process of producing a live-plus-online hybrid meeting, scheduled in our usual time slot next December. And ISTE, for which I’ve also done conference planning, has announced they will return to live in New Orleans next June. Where I’m sure they hope to attract their usual crowd of around 15,000 educators and vendors.2
But none of these plans are certain. The ongoing chaos, with new virus variants and slow vaccination rates, makes it very difficult to make firm plans for four months from now, or even in a year.
And when the world has moved beyond dealing with COVID, sponsors of edtech conferences have to wonder if their audiences will ever fully return. Will schools and districts pay the hundreds or thousands of dollars required to send staff members to the same event (or at least one with the same name) they attended online this year?
For myself, I very much enjoy attending these events live, mostly for the opportunity to interact with and learn from other educators. That interaction didn’t work nearly as well in the online settings used as replacements during the pandemic. Plus there’s something special about a conversation over lunch rather than over Zoom.
However, over the past year, it was also wonderful having the option to drop in on a variety of now-online educational conferences (many at no cost), and gather ideas from new-to-me voices. Events I never would have been able to attend in normal times, even if I knew about them.
One thing I hope organizations learned from having to go digital with their usual events is that they potentially have a larger audience to connect with. They, and that audience, would benefit from continuing to have that online option available. For the many of us without that unlimited travel budget.
The photo shows an arial view of the vendor floor at the last live ISTE Conference I attended, Chicago 2018. Still too early to decide if New Orleans 2022 is in my future.
1. VSTE is the Virginia Society for Technology in Education, an affiliate of ISTE, which is supposed to be “international” but has never held an event outside the US. But I digress…
2. If I had my way, both organizations would require proof of vaccination to even register. Probably won’t happen.
It’s interesting that it’s taken a killer virus to stimulate a change here. From my first conference in the early 1990s and all the way through, as much as I got out of and made the most of the experiences, there was always something off kilter to them. So along with re-thinking the format and platforms, I hope there can be re-consideration of the presentation focus activity base of such gatherings.
Last time I was at a VSTE event I was flying in the air sporting my dog avatar ;-)
Stay safe and well Tim!