NAFSA is a professional organization for educational workers that specialize in international students.
NAFSA tried to do a digital conference to make up for not being able to have one in person due to the COVID pandemic. I said tried because the first 2 days was a failure. The videos kept freezing, going black, or losing sound. It was not just me. The chat box was working and many people were posting that they were experiencing the same thing. This meant that there was an issue with the technology and not just peoples connections which one of the people in the chat tried to blame it on. I understand that trying to throw something together quick right now, but I am a firm believer that if you can’t do something right then don’t do it. The first 2 days reflected badly on NAFSA because of this. Also when you tried to report the tech errors it gave you a message that an error had occurred. Day 1 I just gave up after fighting with it for over an hour.
Day 2 not only did the tech errors keep happening, but then there was also the annoying trend for things not starting on time. At a normal conference it is expected that the presenters would be late because of having to travel between different rooms, but that doesn’t happen when everything is digital. When I asked about it:
Lots of tech issues…..
So what did I get from the first 2 days of the conference, not much…I may have gotten something out of it if the tech issues weren’t happening every few minutes and I had to keep restarting the panel every time it froze. I can only hope that things will get better before day 3.
Top Image From: https://nafsa.digitellinc.com/nafsa/live/7/page/68?events-search-input=&events-search-date=2020-05-27&events-search-track=0
The other images were screen shots directly from the chats in the different panels.
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