Going hybrid: The best of both worlds?

Posted by Helen Moore, Associate Professor (Research), Teesside University

Since 2012 my ability to attend in-person and participate in seminars, conferences and workshops has been significantly reduced. This was partially due to a change in my mobility while I was pregnant with twins twice (!) (2012, 2015), and then after my pregnancies, due to the challenges of arranging childcare for four small children. It has become easier as they have got older, but after my second maternity leave, I returned to work but remained the primary carer for four children under the age of four as their father (my husband), was (and still is) a Merchant Navy captain, which involves working away for half of every year.

Make an enquiry about getting professional technical help as soon as you conceive the idea
 – don’t assume it will be prohibitively expensive

During this time, I had always felt very grateful to any event organiser who took the time to release the slides after their events or, as time progressed and technology moved on, to run an additional online version as this enabled me to participate, albeit in a less than perfect fashion, but I viewed it as certainly being better than nothing. I hadn’t really appreciated how many other people were also often unable to attend events in-person, due to other factors in their lives, but this was brought into sharper focus for me with the Covid-19 pandemic when I started reading, and joining in with, conversations on social media around event accessibility that had never been on my radar.

I’m sure everyone remembers that when lockdowns were imposed, initially events were completely cancelled but as time progressed and it became clear this was not going to be a ‘flash in the pan’, the planning stages of events began to include considerations of how best to run them entirely online, with many people having to rapidly learn and develop skills around using technology to engage with the maximum number of participants possible.

Between January-April 2021, I was part of a team that worked on a project commissioned by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) which looked at the impact of Covid-19 on the hot food takeaway planning regulatory environment in North East England. As the project drew to a close the team thought that this, alongside other work we had been involved in, or were aware of, would make an excellent Fuse Research Event, and my colleague Professor Amelia Lake and I decided we would work together to make it happen.

I was keen to explore the possibilities of having a, in my view, truly hybrid event, where participants could choose to attend in person or via a real time remote video stream, and where presenters could choose to be in the room or present via a MS Teams link. I had previously worked with the team from Teesside University’s Aurora House on other projects, and Amelia had worked with them to create the live stream of her inaugural professorial lecture, so we were confident that they possessed the skills, the technology and the will to ensure this could happen.

It took a lot of organisation to get this to work, and having organised many events pre-Covid, it was definitely more work than if we had decided to run a traditional event with in-person attendance only. I spent significant amounts of time thinking about how we could include the remote audience and presenters in the discussion in the most effective way. The entire event was live streamed on the Fuse YouTube channel, with a technician ensuring that the virtual audience saw a mix of angles and information during the session. We used sli.do to allow the remote audience to submit questions during each presentation, and then one of the organising team asked the questions using the same microphone that was used for questions from the room so everyone could hear.

 

We only had one minor hiccup, in that we used my personal Teams account to allow the external speakers to present, and I forgot to decline meetings that were scheduled to run at the same time – and, of course, the other meeting used the chat function, which meant everyone could read their messages! We managed to get a message to the other meeting and they quickly stopped using the chat function!

As usual, we asked for feedback on the event, and the comments were extremely positive, including the fact it was hybrid, with “Ability to attend online”, mentioned in more than one response.

I would absolutely encourage people to think about making the effort to run hybrid events. it widens your audience and opens up different avenues for discussion – posing a question via an online function is, for most people, less scary than standing up and speaking into a microphone! 

My top tips for running a hybrid event

While I was writing this blog, I thought about what my top five tips would be for anyone considering running a hybrid event in the future:

1. Make an enquiry about getting professional technical help as soon as you conceive the idea – don’t assume it will be prohibitively expensive;
2. Ensure you communicate with the presenters and attendees, before and during the event, about how they can interact and engage during the event;
3. Use interactive apps such as sli.do.
4. Avoid using personal accounts for external events, such as Teams or Zoom (or make sure to decline any other meetings scheduled at the same time!)
5. Always ask for feedback to improve future events.