tenure applications loaded up with virtual conferences

[lightning]

This makes me feel less excited about my "international" conference presentation I did from my basement in the U.S. when the conference was based in Australia.

Yeah, there were definitely those perks of  dumping one's teaching obligations for the week on someone else & having an excuse to not attend meetings for that week, in order to retreat and focus completely on our research areas. This, in addition to visiting an international destination on the university's tab. We are going to find ourselves sucked into the virtual conference world of cheaper and more convenient alternatives to in-person conferences, especially since admincritters LOVE the fact that virtual conferences are cheaper for the university to "send" a faculty member. Admincritters also love the fact that now there is no excuse to not attend meetings for our job, while attending virtual conferences.

The major conference in my field is already making permanent changes to how they do their conferences. It will be in a hybrid format, from now on, even after the pandemic.

The virtual conference will definitely make it easier for us to attend more conferences, and that will be reflected in CVs, but it will also make it harder for us to actually leave our job behind, in order to focus on informing our research, checking out new developments in the field, and professional networking.

And of course, the next time I want to attend a conference in Paris or something like that, some bean counter will ask me to take the hybrid option or online option, instead, and remind me of a P&T meeting that I can still coordinate and chair, during the conference week.

[downer]

This makes me feel less excited about my "international" conference presentation I did from my basement in the U.S. when the conference was based in Australia.

Yeah, there were definitely those perks of  dumping one's teaching obligations for the week on someone else & having an excuse to not attend meetings for that week, in order to retreat and focus completely on our research areas. This, in addition to visiting an international destination on the university's tab. We are going to find ourselves sucked into the virtual conference world of cheaper and more convenient alternatives to in-person conferences, especially since admincritters LOVE the fact that virtual conferences are cheaper for the university to "send" a faculty member. Admincritters also love the fact that now there is no excuse to not attend meetings for our job, while attending virtual conferences.

The major conference in my field is already making permanent changes to how they do their conferences. It will be in a hybrid format, from now on, even after the pandemic.

The virtual conference will definitely make it easier for us to attend more conferences, and that will be reflected in CVs, but it will also make it harder for us to actually leave our job behind, in order to focus on informing our research, checking out new developments in the field, and professional networking.

And of course, the next time I want to attend a conference in Paris or something like that, some bean counter will ask me to take the hybrid option or online option, instead, and remind me of a P&T meeting that I can still coordinate and chair, during the conference week.

This probably deserves a separate thread, but I agree that conferences are going to be very different.

Even before the pandemic, people were concerned about those who could not afford to travel, and also the environmental costs of more plane travel.

But doing a conference presentation in hybrid format, to both a live audience and people watching online, is more difficult than a regular conference presentation. It also requires more technology from the conference organizers, and help from IT. That can be expensive, and there are questions about how to pay for it. Probably easy for big organizations but difficult for small ones.

There is also the networking element. Much harder to duplicate online.

And one of the big incentives for going to a conference was going to see a new place. (At least for me.)

Another issue I've noticed is multi-day conferences. If you travel to the conference, then you might skip half a day to do some exploring and attend most of the rest of the sessions. But if you are participating online, you will probably skip a lot of talks, and the idea of doing multi-day participation will seem unappealing to most.

[darkstarrynight]

This makes me feel less excited about my "international" conference presentation I did from my basement in the U.S. when the conference was based in Australia.

Don't think one conference will make or break a tenure case.

Fortunately, I got tenured (found out the day campus shut down in 2020) before this presentation. I was just being silly, sorry.
Thanks mamselle for the kind words though - I was pretty pumped for an international presentation from my exotic basement.

[Harlow2]

The higher-ups at my university are encouraging college P&T committees to allow a narrative from a candidate that explains how COVID-19 impacted their research trajectory. I think that is fair, especially if the university did not allow for pausing someone's six-year tenure clock during COVID-19. Of course, now the committee members with the attention span of goldfish will have an additional document to read.
[/quote]

We are doing the same thing at my institution, with slight variations.

[fast_and_bulbous]

And unless you were in the room you have no idea what a given "Presented at X Conference" line on a CV really means. Did the person present an electrifying tour-de-force to a packed hall, a presentation so rich in provocative ideas that it was the talk of the hotel bar for the next three days and resulted in multiple publisher inquiries? Or did they mumble their way through a half-assed rehash of some Wikipedia articles to a Sunday morning audience of three people with their suitcases who were checking their phones to see if their Uber was ready? I have seen both kinds of presentations, and done the latter myself. But when I got back home I told everyone how I rocked it.

I just record myself, stitch the audio into my presentation and put it in my youtube channel, then there's no question what happened. I also include the questions and answers. It's not difficult to do.

[Kron3007]

Given the situation, virtual conferences are the only conferences available so I dont see how you would not "count" them.  In some ways I see them as "less than", but in reality, the amount of work presenting and delivering the talk is the same regardless of format.  Just because you dont have to travel to give the presentation, really dosnt change what it is.

On a related note, I have several graduate students.  Most of them did not participate in many virtual conferences even though they had the opportunity, but one presented at several.  The one who chose to take advantage of this opportunity also happens to be one of my best students by any metric, so I feel taking the initiative to capitalize on this as an opportunity is a good sign by any measure.  Sure, they may just be doing it to boost their CV, but that is also true of presenting at regular conferences etc.

So, I dont really see much difference, and as others have said it is unlikely that participating in 10 vs 3 conferences would make or break a tenure bid.  I have a hard time envisioning a case where this would be a deciding factor.