Sense of control
Participate in as many sessions as you wish (or are able to)
If you need to spend four days away at a conference it can be quite hard to catch up when you get back especially if it has been busy back in the office. You might be able to answer a few e-mails at the conference, but you certainly won’t have been able to attend that important meeting.
On the other hand attending an online conference doesn’t mean that you can work in your office just as you normally would. Well you can, but you would miss the conference! It makes sense when attending the online conference to allocate time in your diary so that others in your organisation know that you are attending a conference. You may find it useful to explain how an online conference works to your colleagues so that they are aware of what you are doing hiding in your office or at your desk. As a result you can decide which sessions you will attend, which you might watch later and those that you will look at after the conference has finished during the reading weeks afterwards. This also means you can attend that important meeting, take that phone call or teach that class.
The way in which the conference is run does mean that you can attend the conference in the evening, late at night or early in the morning. This is as you can imagine is also really useful for those delegates attending from countries in different time zones.
We would recommend that you spend at least four hours a day at the conference, preferably a lot more. This will allow you to keep up with debates and the volume of messages coming in.