Abstract
As all organizations are discovering during the global public health crisis of COVID-19, scientific conferences, meetings, and workshops are having to evolve. A major pivot toward using online platforms to support learning and collaboration has been met with doubt that interaction can be recreated and maintained, as it was during in-person events. Maintaining engagement with participants, with the lack of direct eye contact with participants within a conference center, provides a challenge. An even greater test is to conduct a truly interactive workshop under these conditions. Direct feedback from the audience is a central element of workshops.
On October 23, 2020, during the ISBER_UHN_2020 Symposium, we conducted a 2-hour workshop on Biobank Business Planning with emphasis on the pandemic's impact on research and clinical biobanking. The workshop presenters introduced the components of a strong business plan, including a defined vision and mission, an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOTs), risk mitigation, and defined performance metrics. The workshop included a lively virtual discussion on the variability in biobanks, in their size, scope, and research focus, and how those differences are mirrored within their business plans.
Based on the poll feedback from participants during the workshop, business planning in biobanking continues to expand, with large variation in the level of inclusion of all the key business plan elements and monitoring of success against Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time bound (SMART) goals and objectives.
Holding a successful, fun, and interactive workshop online involved a large effort in preplanning by the presenters and organizers. Premeeting and postmeeting handouts were created and posted for all of the meeting participants. We took advantage of all of the methods of interaction available on the platform. These included live polling on the topics being presented to maintain engagement, enabling participants to provide examples from their prework and capture ideas in the chat box, and posing open-ended questions to participants in the Q&A channel. The interactive activity encouraged the 100+ participants to provide input to a real-time SWOT analysis during the workshop. It was important to provide summaries of the topics being discussed and allowing for feedback from the participants at multiple points during the workshop. To effectively manage all of the channels of engagement during the workshop, it was necessary to have three presenters, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The meeting organizers did a fantastic job in providing presenters the opportunity to get comfortable with the online platform before the actual conference dates.
The silver lining of the massive movement toward the use of online tools for meetings, conferences, and workshops is the speed of their evolution to support meaningful interactions while we must remain distant. It is envisioned that these evolved tools will continue to allow engagement of our community even after the limitations on travel have ended.