Ten Simple Rules for organizing a non–real-time web conference

The present work describes the 100% virtual ATIDES (Avances en Tecnologı́as, Innovación y Desafı́os de la Educación Superior) conference that was held between October 15 and 31, 2018, sponsored by Universitat Jaume I (UJI), Spain. Online conferences like this have been the subject of some controversy in the field of education over the last decade. Indeed, we have found a few texts that are against them. One of these is [1], whose authors claim that “interaction is not enough” to ensure efficient simulation of face-to-face contact. However, the Canadian academic community (for instance, the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University) is a strong advocate of online conferences (see [2,3]). Among other advantages, this kind of conference is “family-friendly,” i.e., they break barriers for researchers with family obligations [4], in particular many women [5]. In addition, these conferences overcome the drawback of parallel sessions at face-to-face conferences, at which participants must choose certain talks and miss others. Anderson and Anderson [6] even put forward environmental and economic arguments: “Transportation is a major contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.” On the other hand, Abdullah [7] and Kear, Chetwynd, and Jefferis [8] look at the matter from another point of view that is also important: Social presence at online conferences. Gichora and colleagues [9] propose 10 rules for organizing a virtual conference, but they only focus on real-time virtual conferences. Real-time virtual conferences emulate the structure of well-known on-site conferences, with the use of video-conferencing tools for connecting the participants in a virtual meeting. We, on the other hand, focus on non–real-time web conferences. In this kind of conference, a web platform connects the participants, but the event does not take place live. Communication can be made through posts on a forum, which can sometimes take hours or even days. Non–real-time web conferences share many of the advantages of real-time virtual conferences, such as being family friendly and allowing the involvement of participants with a low budget for traveling, which makes this kind of conference more participative and inclusive. However, non–real-time web conferences have other advantages that real-time web conferences do not. Asynchronous interaction allows the attendees to have more time for reflection before they put forward their questions and comments, and, likewise, the speaker has enough time to prepare an appropriate answer. This makes up for the lack of face-to-face social interaction in this type of conference. In fact, numerous interactions occur via forums and are, in many cases, numerous and more informal and flexible than at classical scientific meetings [10]. Forums give rise to stimulating discussions like those that can occur at unconferences [11]. Furthermore, this asynchrony allows participants from all over the world to take part without worrying about time zone differences. PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY