Electronic Conferencing For Faculty Continuing Development

Many engineering faculty members in developing and emerging countries find it nearly impossible to participate in continuing professional development through attendance at major international conferences in their areas of interest. One mechanism to address this problem is the addition of an electronic conference component to major engineering education conferences, to allow distant participation in paper presentation and discussion by such faculty members. This paper describes two such electronic conferences, organized by the authors in conjunction with major international conferences – the 2001 annual meeting of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) and the 2003 joint international conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO). In each case, an electronic conference was run for several weeks before the live conference, with papers from distant engineering faculty members posted on a web site for discussion. Then a summary of the papers and the discussion was presented at a plenary session at the live meeting, with the session video taped with the intent of transmitting it back to the authors. In the case of the electronic conference held in conjunction with the WFEO/ASEE annual meeting, a summary paper of the plenary session was also produced for publication. Details of the process of organizing and conducting these electronic conferences are provided in the paper.