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Caring Chairing: Tips for Effective Chairing in Online Spaces

By Dr Sinéad Murphy

Whatever your degree of experience in chairing meetings, discussions, or conference sessions, the last 18 months or so have likely been a learning curve as we moved rapidly into managing these exchanges in online spaces. We at SRHE have moved all our events, seminars, and training workshops online as of March 2020, and have worked hard to ensure our online sessions are engaging, inclusive, and productive.

With our first ever virtual edition of the annual SRHE International Conference coming up on 6th – 10th December, we would like to share some of the best practice we have learned about chairing. We intend to put this in place at our conference, and look forward to supporting those who may be new to chairing conference sessions, whether online or otherwise. We would love to hear your own tips and ideas on effective chairing in the comments.

Before the session

  • Chairing online sessions is a far more enjoyable experience when you are not distracted by technical difficulties: we advise meeting your speakers in advance of the session start time to check any audio-visuals and screen-sharing functionality. Ensure that you have some familiarity with the platform you are using, and that you have some knowledge of basic troubleshooting or some technical support available (at SRHE, for instance, one or more staff members are always on hand to provide this during online sessions). For more presenting tips, you might like to take a look at our previous post on online academic presentations here.
  • Liaising with your speakers on the schedule and session format and factoring in well-timed comfort breaks will help you to run a session which is both punctual and relaxed for everyone involved.
  • Ensure that you are pronouncing your speakers’ names correctly, and have given them an opportunity to let you know how they prefer to be introduced and addressed.
  • Decide on the availability of presentation materials in advance, and ensure speakers are aware of and in agreement with this policy.
  • Taking notes in a session may be useful for participants to reflect on later. Decide in advance whether you as chair have capacity to do this, or if you would prefer to draw on a colleague for support. Could the session be recorded and/or written up afterwards and shared on the relevant website or other virtual platform?

During the session

  • Begin the session by clearly communicating the format and structure of the event, and the rules of engagement – ensure that participants know how and when they are welcome to turn their cameras/microphones on and off, how and when they can interject or ask for help, and how to address the speakers.
  • Timekeeping is essential to effective chairing. Although online formats present a promising opportunity to overcome the barriers some participants face in attend some events in person, it’s important to remember that most participants will be juggling competing responsibilities and working from shared or confined spaces. The chair should lead the way in ensuring that both speakers and attendees respect and adhere to the session schedule. Wherever possible, any changes to timings and format should be communicated ahead to all participants.
  • Managing the discursive aspects of an online session is a key element of productive chairing. In online spaces, the chair will often be required to monitor the written chat as well as being alert to raised hands and other forms of interjection – ensure that you seek support or a co-chair in advance of the session if this is too much juggling for you, or if you are leading a session with a large number of participants. As chair, adding a question to the chat box early on in the session can help to mitigate any reticence among participants about contributing to the discussion.
  • During discussions, the chair should take the initiative to redirect questions where necessary, whether to engage all the speakers, to avoid the discussion becoming too niche or exclusionary, or to encourage participants to reframe comments into questions. Consider the diversity of the session attendees when you select people to answer questions – for example, if women or BAME attendees are in the minority, try to ensure their voices are heard.
  • Take care to use gender-neutral language for anyone whose form of address is not known to you.
  • Software such as Slido or Mentimeter can be useful to facilitate questions in a way that does not require participants to speak individually/aloud.
  • If a participant elects to use the chat box, avoid calling on them to ask their question aloud; likewise, it’s advisable not to mandate that attendees participate in the discussion with their camera turned on.
  • Although discussions in online space can be fast-paced and require focussed attention, they also provide opportunities for collaboration. You might consider encouraging participants to share contact information, generate a collaborative reference list, or continue the discussion on social media or other platforms.

Ending the meeting

  • You may find that there are attendees who feel unable to fully participate at the time for whatever reason, or who require time to process the content of the session and formulate their contribution. These attendees can benefit from mechanisms which allow the discussion to continue beyond the event. The chair might consider collating unasked or unanswered questions and communicating them to the speaker(s) by e-mail, to make the responses available to participants later.
  • Provided the speakers are comfortable with this, the chair should ensure that attendees are aware of how they can contact the speakers outside of the session.
  • Closing the session with a summarising statement or a comment which draws the different insights offered during the discussion is a very effective way to leave attendees with food for thought about what could follow from the session.
  • As well as thanking everyone, you might consider signposting attendees to the next session on the programme, or a subsequent event on the same topic or by the same speaker(s).
  • Ensure that participants are aware of how they can offer feedback about the session. At SHRE, we circulate an evaluation form after each of our events and these help us to understand what our membership and wider community would benefit from.

We hope you find these guidelines helpful in preparing for our conference and for the online activities you will engage in this coming academic year. We are looking forward to seeing what new opportunities our virtual conference will provide – it takes place 6th – 10th December and registration is open here. We will be updating our conference pages with more information about the programme in the new academic year. If you have your own ideas for a contribution to the blog, we would love to hear from you!

Sinéad Murphy is the Manager, Conferences and Events for the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) and is responsible for SRHE’s events, workshops, professional development programme, and annual international conference. She holds an AHRC-funded PhD in Comparative Literature from King’s College London, and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.


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Literature reviews and how to do them: an SRHE webinar in the time of Corona

by Akmarzhan Nogaibayeva

For some PhD students attending conferences, research seminars and so on means getting a break from research and it means leaving the library or the lab. During the pandemic everyone has started working remotely and has become only virtually accessible. Cancelling planned face to face events to avoid social contact has made our life extremely quiet and isolated. However, this unusual situation has given me time to reflect on the importance of attending conferences, seminars and other events related to my field. Since the lockdown I have had the chance to attend webinars organized by SRHE. I was lucky to listen to talks on different topics and this  opened new ways of thinking about a topic, giving me access to new ideas that I had previously never thought about. This blog reflects on a webinar I attended recently on ‘Undertaking Literature Reviews’ which took place on 29 April 2020, hosted by SRHE. Even though I had attended a seminar on Literature Reviews (LR) two years earlier, during my first year of study, I still had some remaining questions: What type of review did I carry out in my study? And, Where does my voice come into my review? Hoping to get answers to these questions from the presenter as well as from other researchers I was happy to attend the online webinar without wasting time travelling long distances.

Before the start of the webinar we were provided with slides and articles to discover different approaches to the literature review, which can either shape the chapter for the proposed study or provide a background for an academic article. The material suggested three broad approaches: narrative, systematic and theoretical. The Narrative approach is a review that tries to tell a story, reviewing the extant literature as a way of attempting to summarise what has been written on a particular topic. The systematic approach is a way of reviewing literature by using more objective criteria with a goal of summarising enormous amounts of research, scientifically tracking them for quality control. The theoretical approach is a review that covers the history of different meanings given to key terms in a study that has accumulated evidence in regard to concepts, theories or phenomena. The overall aim of the LR is to persuade other scholars in the field of your command of the relevant literature. My own original LR had been a narrative review in a more traditional way that most doctoral researchers tend to follow, mixing concepts and case studies, organising them under big themes followed by subthemes. I chose this approach to show the research committee what I know about my topic. This type of  narrative LR helped me to understand my topic by focusing precisely on the context of my research and in establishing  the theoretical framework of  the study.  

From the beginning of the seminar I noticed how the presenter warmly welcomed attendees, letting them introduce themselves by asking the reasons for attending this webinar and their expectations. Even though we were all connected online maintaining physical distance, by introducing ourselves and reflecting on the question ‘why we are attending this online seminar’ we softened the boundaries. Participants came from different backgrounds: experienced supervisors; university lecturers; PhD students like me; and people interested in pursuing a PhD in the future. They all had different reasons to join this online event; some of them had professional interests and wanted to get some suggestions for dealing with their own students` questions; some like myself were undertaking doctoral research of their own and were returning to LR in that context. The webinar description on the website was a clear prospectus: by attending this webinar we would be able to answer questions on the objectives of LR, examine epistemological assumptions about LR and engage in discussion by comparing the types of LR.

The facilitator of the webinar, Dr Michael Hammond (Warwick), started his talk by inviting participants to think about the question, ‘Why do we do LR?’ The answer to this question was a major theme that would guide us through the whole seminar. One answer was that it is a way of knowing where you fit in. The LR must not only demonstrate that I understand debates and conversations, but how my research will contribute to the field. In other words I should be able to create an argument as to why my work is relevant to my field by evaluating conversations surrounding my work describing their weaknesses and strengths.

We also discussed finding the gap that our research addresses, and the importance of finding models of methodology to orient oneself – in carrying out a literature review can you find a study that follows a methodology that you want to use? A literature review should be a critical examination of what has come earlier. I was inspired by thinking about the value and status of literature and we all got the chance to ask questions. One participant wanted to understand where the researcher’s voice comes in the review and shared her view that the voice of the researcher comes from what you choose to cite. Another participant raised the question of what to do if the researcher finds that an existing literature review has already covered the things that you want to discuss. The presenter explained you can re-present past reviews in ways that are more relevant for your particular research question but there was always the opportunity to update any review. 

Later we were invited to discuss LR in  groups. It was an enjoyable experience, with Zoom creating space for individuals to share their views and experiences of doing reviews. After a while we returned to our main group space. I felt because of this that online events could follow some of the processes common to face to face working. Thanks to the questions raised during the discussion and by sharing my own experience I gained more understanding of LR and had some answers to the questions that I had in my mind.

In conclusion the presenter showed us ways of organising the literature review by using different tools like Endnote and Mendeley. I noticed how the facilitator of the webinar could present his own thoughts, reflecting back again to the questions posed at the beginning of the seminar. As a doctoral researcher I had found answers to my own questions. This event helped me to reflect on my own literature review, carried out two years ago. When I return to it again I will have in the front of my mind the question of how my work will add to the knowledge in my field. 

When I first started writing my LR I tried to briefly point out debates and conversations in what has been published about my topic. As my research is looking at the use of technologies in language teaching and learning I discussed the use of technologies chronologically, organizing them under themes, basically looking at the key ideas and theoretical approaches. However, after attending this webinar I have understood the importance of organizing the LR from the beginning around the key ideas and concepts or theoretical approaches. As the presenter explained, making an example of his students` work, organizing your LR from the beginning might be very useful in setting up a coding process of your interview analysis at the later stages of your proposed work.


Akmarzhan Nogaibayeva is a third-year PhD student at the University of Warwick, researching language teachers` ICT use through the lens of ecological theory, in higher education in Kazakhstan.