In the fall of 2019, before the global pandemic took hold, we, Greg Stoutenburg (York College Pennsylvania – YCP) Kristopher Phillips (Southern Utah University – SUU), both taught undergraduate epistemology courses. While we taught different materials, we were able to organize a cross-college, digital, asynchronous conference experience for all of our epistemology students. Utilizing Google Docs and Google Drive, a coordinated schedule, and sharing commentary guidelines, we were able to develop and run an asynchronous undergraduate epistemology conference. Especially given the challenges presented to all of us in the coming year, we believe that the structure, utilization of free resources, and outcomes we saw from this experimental approach could be easily replicated, and provides an opportunity most undergraduates do not have to engage with their peers across the country in a sustained, structured way. It is worth emphasizing that this is a cost-free project that makes the conference experience accessible to every student in the classroom, and that the same virtual conference approach can be used in many disciplines outside of philosophy. In what follows, we discuss the motivation, logistics, execution, and outcomes of our conference. Additionally, we flag possible challenges you may face in developing and offering this sort of digital conference experience to your students.
Why a Virtual Conference?
There are several reasons why an asynchronous student philosophy conference. A “virtual conference” is a useful tool to incorporate in the classroom. In this era of pandemic, we are looking for innovative and effective ways to teach both content and skills. Undergraduate philosophy conferences are not terribly common, they tend to be quite selective, and many faculty have talented students who, for myriad reasons, cannot afford to attend a conference should they have their work accepted. A conference experience provides an invaluable opportunity for students to engage with philosophy in a way that is radically different from learning class content or rehearsed arguments with familiar voices. Indeed, in a conference setting, students have little option but to do philosophy in real time with unfamiliar interlocutors. In this way, teachers are able to engage all students with philosophical material in a way that goes beyond thinking of class content as ‘just more class stuff’ or as the province of the most vocal few in the classroom. A virtual conference, as we conceive of it, takes the functional components of a philosophy conference and puts them online. In a traditional philosophy conference, there are four essential components:
- Paper presentations
- Commentaries
- Responses to commentaries, and
- A question-and-answer period.
As the essential components are so few, there is no reason in principle why a conference cannot be transformed to online delivery. There are some obstacles to overcome and some obvious differences in terms of execution, but we think of a virtual conference as functionally equivalent to a traditional face-to-face conference.
Logistical Issues
While we might want to pursue a synchronous, Zoom, or Google Classroom style conference, our two colleges are in time zones two hours apart. Furthermore, a synchronous conference that involved all four conference components for twenty-something students per class would be far too time-consuming. So, a synchronous online conference would require scheduling many additional class hours outside of our students’ already busy schedules. The trick, then, is to capture the functional components of a conference, maximize student engagement with the conference functions most relevant to each student, and keep our workload manageable (as we both teach a 4-4 load).
For a virtual conference to progress smoothly, it is vital that each student participates fully and on-time at each stage, as further activities of other participants depend upon prior student involvement. Because of this, students who do not submit work, or who submit it late, negatively and seriously affect the experience of other students. We spent a good amount of time stressing the importance of completing work on time with our students, but students’ lives are complicated, and things come up. For example, as we approached the conference itself, one of the students at SUU dropped the course. This resulted in a disparity in numbers between the students. We reached out to the class and asked who might be willing to do two commentaries (with the promise of extra credit, and sincere gratitude). Several students showed interest, which helped to address the asymmetry in the number of submissions.
We sought to balance the traditional conference feel of a dedicated time and place within which to discuss specific ideas with the constraints imposed by holding an asynchronous conference. The closest simulation of the face-to-face conference experience would be to record students delivering presentations, then send the presenting student a video of another student commenting on the presentation, record another video of the presenter replying to the commentary, and then put the presenting student in a (synchronous) video chat with a few students for Q&A. Due to our specific circumstances, we thought that would be too significant of a technological hurdle, and something of a scheduling nightmare. Instead, we chose to have students use Google Drive and Google Docs to submit and comment on materials. The same functions could be performed with other software, such as Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive.
Execution
Our conference took place over the course of about ten days. Students each uploaded a brief, focused paper (about 1,500 words) to a digital folder that we created. They entered their names into a spreadsheet that paired each student with a student from the other class. Over the next four days, we worked with our students to develop, write, and submit formal commentaries on their peer’s paper. (See this link for the various guidelines given to students.) They submitted those commentaries in the Drive folder that housed the paper they commented on. Each student received a commentary on their paper, and had four days to submit a brief response to the commentary that they received. At this point, we asked each student to compile a single Google Doc that contained their own paper, the commentary received on their paper, and their reply to the commentary. In a traditional conference, this is when the exchange transitions from speaker-and-commenter to speaker-and-audience.
The final stage is Q&A, where we again sought to balance engagement and workload. We put students in groups of five, comprising peers from their own class. Students were then instructed to read all four of their group members’ papers, commentaries, and responses to the commentaries. After reading through the material, each student was to ask at least one question on each group member’s Google Doc, and to reply to each question they received on their own document. In this way, each student had the experience of a close exchange with four classmates, much in the way that a standard one-day conference involves close exchanges with participants who have engaged with a few presentations.
Outcomes
Overall the conference was a success. All of the SUU students who responded to our final survey (17/17) reported that the conference experience was rewarding, and virtually all of them preferred this experience to a traditional one-off term-paper (one student reported indifference). Several students expressed that the experience helped them gain a sense of where they stood as philosophers relative to their peers, rather than professors and famous thinkers. Along similar lines, one student expressed feeling imposter syndrome even among their peers at SUU, but felt an increased sense of confidence in their own skills after reading their peers’ work from both schools. When asked how we could improve the process, the most common theme concerned the feedback they received from their peers at YCP.
YCP students as a group were less enthusiastic, but expressed generally positive to neutral feelings. Of 22 students who participated, 10 completed the final survey. Of those 10, 8 were positive to neutral in favor of holding a virtual conference in place of a longer paper. 8 gave positive to neutral responses to the prompt, “The virtual conference exchange was rewarding” with the majority responding “neutral”. 5 students indicated that they did not take writing comments more seriously knowing that the comments were for a peer rather than a professor, which may explain the issue noted in the previous paragraph. Written comments indicated that several students found value in writing and receiving peer feedback. Negative comments indicated that some students thought the Reply and Question and Answer portions of the conference could have been better organized.
To understand these divergent student responses, we note that all of the SUU students were upper-level philosophy majors, while only 3/22 of YCP students were, and most of the rest took the course for general education credit. Perhaps students antecedently more interested in course content are more likely to find the virtual conference stimulating.
We were careful to explain to the students in our classes that their peers at the other school did not read the same material, so it is of the utmost importance that they understand this. While students are often instructed to write for an audience that is unfamiliar with course content, delivery, or discussion, that lesson seems to have landed differently when students knew they were writing for someone other than their professor (or in-class peers). Just as is the case at a general philosophy conference, the audience does not necessarily have any background familiarity with the ideas presented in a paper. Even when it comes to the commentaries, it’s not always the case that we know all the source material. This was particularly eye opening for our students. One student said of the experience, “it forced me to think about my writing in a different way, as I knew that seven or more people would be reading it.” This student went on to say that sitting with their own writing and the comments on it for so long made them rethink how they would approach writing projects in the future.
Offering this type of professional-style experience is invaluable to our students, not only in terms of reinforcing the philosophical content we aim to teach them, but in getting them to do philosophy in real time. Sitting with a pointed but constructive commentary on one’s work, from a stranger no less, can be a little jarring at first. But it’s also a really valuable exercise. We pitched the project as a way to engage in the mutual pursuit of truth, not a point-scoring opportunity, and our students recognized and appreciated this. All of the students were trying to help one another become better thinkers, writers and philosophers. We suggest that the asynchronous conference model is a great way to help all of our undergraduates have that experience.
Kristopher G. Phillips
Kristopher G. Phillips is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Utah University. He is a trained modernist, with research interests in Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shepherd, the philosophy of education, and pre-college philosophy. He is the co-founder of the Utah and Iowa Lyceum programs, and currently serves as Associate Editor for the journal Precollege Philosophy and Public Practice.
Greg Stoutenburg
Greg Stoutenburg is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York College of Pennsylvania. He specializes in epistemology, co-founded the Iowa Lyceum, and serves on PLATO's Toolkit Committee.
