Better Q&A’s through Zoom?

I suspect I was not alone in approaching the prospect of a virtual conference with some trepidation. Despite my introverted nature, I quite enjoy academic conferences. I feared that Zooming into USIH events from my home office would pale in comparison to an in-person conference.

Thanks to the efforts of Sara Georgini, Tim Lacy, and my colleagues on the program committee, I have been delighted by a year-long program that has exceeded my hopes. While I look forward to a return to conference normality, I hope that future events might adopt a feature of Zoom panels that I found to be more effective than its in-person counterpart: the Q&A chat.

From my perspective as both a panelist and an attendee at USIH events this year, written questions – with upvotes – offered three benefits over the traditional question-and-answer format.

As a presenter, I appreciated having a few minutes to reflect on questions before responding to them. The extra time allowed me to ponder exactly what was being asked and to thoughtfully formulate an answer before replying. Not only did this help me to address the question in a more substantive manner, but it also allowed me to do so more succinctly than I would have if I had been working through a response as I spoke. This, in turn, created more time for questions and additional opportunities for conversation among panelists.

Moreover, I found it extraordinarily helpful to leave my panel with a written record of audience questions. After many an in-person conference, I have returned home eager to digest the commentary I received during the Q&A – only to discover that my scribblings on a hotel notepad were totally indecipherable. Far too often, the insights that emerge during discussions between panelists and audience members are lost the moment a conference ends. The unfortunate necessity of virtual panels has allowed us to develop a means to preserve these valuable insights.

The benefits of this format extend to members of the audience as well. The public nature of the Q&A chat allows panel discussions to truly be sites of collaborative engagement. Seeing colleagues’ questions saved me from formulating redundant ones. Likewise, having the opportunity to up-vote the questions of others offered a way to guide the conversation without needing to interject personally. In numerous ways, this one feature of the virtual conference made panels inclusive of a greater number of perspectives.

I eagerly look forward to the day when I will be able to stop using Zoom for much of my professional life. Nevertheless, the Q&A feature of Zoom has allowed us to make conference panels more useful for presenters and more collegial for attendees. It is a feature we would be well served by continuing to use in the future.