On the Requirements and Architecture of All-in-One Platform for Virtual Conferences

Abstract

With the contact-free situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations tend to host virtual events instead of conventional offline events. Since many things should be handled through the online operations, the traditional system for offline events should be re-designed to support the whole process of virtual events. In this paper, we propose an architecture of an all-in-one platform for virtual conferences. The platform provides full services required by a virtual conference which is easy enough for both IT and non-IT experts. The platform provides tailored functions and menus according to the specific size, nature, and field of an academic event. Experimental results show that the parallel upload function of the proposed architecture achieves significantly higher upload speed for sharing a presentation video after the recording ends, compared to the usual video upload function.

The future of scientific conferences in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic: Critical analysis and future perspectives

“…[23] . Some of the selected studies presented the results of conference satisfaction surveys, with questionnaires filled out by the participants, including the speakers [24] . Many organizers used satisfaction surveys to identify strengths and weaknesses of the event.…”

Virtual academic conferencing: a scoping review of 1984–2021 literature. Novel modalities vs. long standing challenges in scholarly communication

“…More than half (19) of the documents appeared in venues representing education and computer sciences as well as the nexus of these areas, such as educational technology (a report by Green (1998) also belongs to this group). Three were published in library and information science journals (Baird & Borer, 1987;O'Haver, 1995;Peuler & McCallister, 2019); one review article was published in a journal focused on hospitality and Virtual academic conferencing...…”

“…The two works from the 1980s (Baird & Borer, 1987;Tombaugh, 1984) discuss the early beginnings of text-based computer conferencing as the then-emerging form of computer-mediated communication. Next, papers published in the 1990s and 2000s provide examples of introducing VC in various areas, such as chemistry education (Bachrach, 1995;O'Haver, 1995), distance education (T. Anderson, 1996), psychiatry (Batra et al, 1999), political science (Ball, 2000), cardiology (Lecueder & Manyari, 2000), and ergonomics (Thatcher, 2006). Additionally, Green's guide (1998) is based on experience in organizing conferences in the area of learning technologies.…”

“…In addition, in the case of a few articles, one can speak of specific narrow topics concerning virtual conferences. These are articles describing the reactions of conference organizers to the pandemic, presenting statistics on the cancellation of conferences, the transition to a virtual or hybrid form, or analyzing the determinants of these decisions, or show what the consequences are of canceling a conference (Falk & Hagsten, 2021b;Lessing et al, 2020;Weissgerber et al, 2020), pricing of virtual conferences (Falk & Hagsten, 2021a), discuss questionnaire methodology to assess the participants experience of virtual conferences (Hohlfeld et al, 2021), or present specific technical setups for VC, usually focused on enhanced engagement and interaction (Park et al, 2020;B. Rogers et al, 2018;Song et al, n.d.;Wang et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2021).…”

“…advantages of virtual conferences stated in 63 analyzed items (Busse & Kleiber, 2020;Chou & Camerlink, 2021;Falk & Hagsten, 2021a;Hameed et al, 2021;Wilkinson & Hemby, 2000). Most papers integrate the reduction of costs and time and adduce them among many other benefits (Achakulvisut et al, 2021;Fellermann et al, 2020;Kalia et al, 2020;O'Haver, 1995;Salomon & Feldman, 2020). Moving from a physical to a digital event decreased conference organizers' expenses (Bozelos & Vogels, 2021;Jauhiainen, 2021;Mubin et al, 2021;Niner & Wassermann, 2021).…”