Sessions

How to organize and plan your own online event or conference

JALTCALL2020 was the first major JALT conference ever to be held online. It was recognized as a huge success, bringing together almost 100 presenters and attendees from over 60 countries. Participants talked of the event being ‘historically important’ in the way it brought people together in a time of crisis. Yet the transition online was organized in barely two months. The conference team was faced with many challenges, such as building this online system, organising how presenters share their work, ensuring attendees could navigate the online schedule, managing registration/ticketing, hosting online rooms, communicating with their presenters, and creating opportunities for social interaction. They also needed to consider live and asynchronous options and how to share recordings with a wider audience post-conference. During this forum, three members of the JALTCALL2020 team will discuss how it became our SIG’s first completely online conference and how it can be replicated - indeed PanSIG2020 itself was planned using the same online system and framework. Whether you are planning a weekend webinar of your own or a conference with hundreds of attendees, this talk gives you a practical framework to make your own event a success.