Facilitating learning at conferences

Abstract

The typical conference consists of a series of PowerPoint presentations that tend to render participants passive. Students of learning have long abandoned the transfer model that underlies such one-way communication. We propose an alternative theory of conferences that sees them as a forum for learning, mutual inspiration and human flourishing. We offer five design principles that specify how conferences may engage participants more and hence increase their learning. In the research-and-development effort reported here, our team collaborated with conference organisers in Denmark to introduce and facilitate a variety of simple learning techniques at 30 1- and 2-day conferences of up to 300 participants each. We present ten of these techniques and data evaluating them. We conclude that if conference organisers allocate a fraction of the total conference time to facilitated processes that engage participants in various forms of reflective conversation and knowledge sharing, they may enhance the satisfaction and learning-related outcomes experienced by their participants.