4. Virtual poster sessions and online conferences
A lot of academic conferences planned for 2020 were cancelled due to the outbreak. These cancellations have the potential to harm the pace of scientific advancement this year. Pace that is usually accelerated by the cross-pollination of ideas coming from face to face interactions at large events. While the benefits of a physical, offline face-to-face meeting cannot be fully replaced by most online forums, there are ways to convene in an online fashion.
Authorea (link to /conferences to be created) is making available some of its features, free of charge, to conference organizers and attendees, to capture, host, and present conference content. In fact, in a lot of cases, by the time the conference was cancelled, conference attendees had already prepared their talks, slides, posters and proceedings. How can we best leverage this content and disseminate it widely in an online forum?
- A Collection page can be created to showcase all the content related to, for example, a conference poster session - here is an example Collection
- Any of the conference attendees can submit to the collection
- The submitted content can include a poster (e.g. in PDF), image, data, conference proceedings, slides, and even a video in which the attendee presents the content of the submission - here is a very fictitious example of a Talk submission accepted in the collection
- The submitted content can be reviewed and screened by the Collection editors (conference organizers or conference panel/board)
- Upon acceptance, content is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
A video showcasing this workflow for submission and review [1-5] is available
here.
Other ideas to complement and replace conference attendance, include:
- A Reddit-style AMA (Ask Me Anything) for specific time periods to concentrate interaction with and questions to poster presenters. (e.g. Bill Gates recent AMA on covid-19, or Alan Aspuru-Guzik's AMA on disrupting chemistry with AI)
- Setting up conferences, or rather, "unconferences" with Github issues, and allow participants to self-organize online. Two recent unconferences that used Github for this purpose: NCEAS CodeFest and rOpenSci Unconference 2017.
- For those unfamiliar with GitHub, "Unconferences" can be organized on other platforms. Most notably, the American Chemical Society has partnered with Morressier to create "SciMeetings". At the moment SciMeetings is offered complimentary to researchers, and the use of the platform for the posting of research is solely at the discretion of the presenter.
5. Video and audio resources for brainstorming and meetings
Todo
6. Classroom teaching
Teachers and students all over the world are forced to make many fast changes to the way they communicate, pay attention and listen moving from face-to-face classes to online environments. Unlike someone who prepared for teaching or registered to follow a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), the current crisis hit right in the middle of semesters and regardless of how good your internet connection is or whether you have one at all. Basically, in the best case scenario, from one week to another, students and teachers had to get ready to give a presentation from their bedroom, in the worst case scenario they are cut off from teaching and learning for the foreseeable future unless internet company providers come up with plans to accommodate low-income residents' needs and by expanding their coverage. While in the U.S. Comcast just announced an update to their
Internet Essentials program, the University of Ghana is in talks with Vodafone Ghana to distribute SIM cards to all students for accessing university learning content for free. More broadly, some form of
Universal High-Speed Internet for all has now become a necessity.
Further one should consider that presentations are one of the many ways of interacting within a real classroom. Just think about how difficult it has become for Theater, Performing Arts and Fine Art students to showcase their ongoing work that often relies on physical contact and the senses. In what follows we summarize some of the tips to consider for online classroom teaching for lecturers and learning for students.
- Accessibility
- Synchronous (Zoom is the platform of choice in the US but this is not the case in the EU, where often Google Hang Out is preferred) or Asynchronous learning (narrated videos; voice thread desks)
- Consider the type of course (lecture-based; discussion-based)
- Consider the type of assignment (quizzes; tests; short response papers to a lecture; long papers; group projects; presentations)
- Giving feedback
- Storing course materials
How can Authorea help on any of these aspects (ideas: storing lecturers notes, ppts and other materials similar to the Collection page mentioned above? is it better than education platforms like Canvas? Can universities/departments/ individual lecturers that do not use education platforms set up their course offerings on Authorea?)
7. Virtual coffee breaks
Academia is a human endeavor, a social activity. The image of the solitary lab-rat scientists is nothing more than a dated stereotype and it is well known that the academic international environment facilitates creativity.
In the home-office, fewer interruptions are great, more work done! But we still all need mindless breaks, and it helps breaking the isolation if you spend some of them with your team. Enter the virtual coffee break. At Gitlab they are part of the company strategy to create “
a more comfortable, well-rounded environment” to work in.
Virtual coffee break can be done by setting up specific times during the week in which lab members can take a break, call in and chat (great for groups with coffee break at mandated hours), or via a single, permanent chat room to goof around, discuss news, sharing funny pictures and breaking the work routine with the team. The wonderful thing about the #random channel is that it does not require constant attention, it is something that one looks at (if they want) during natural breaks. You are in control of your social interactions, of course, when it happens and how much of it.
Many companies, like
Revelry and
Groove, dedicate a specific chat channel (in whatever platform they use for it) to virtual #watercooler conversations, and so does Wiley's own Physics and Materials Science editorial group. For research groups suddenly separated by necessary social distancing practices, a virtual coffee break is part of new reality: