Ten Simple Rules for organizing a non–real-time web conference

The present work describes the 100% virtual ATIDES (Avances en Tecnologı ´as, Innovacio ´n y Desafı ´os de la Educacio ´n Superior) conference that was held between October 15 and 31, 2018, sponsored by Universitat Jaume I (UJI), Spain. Online conferences like this have been the subject of some controversy in the field of education over the last decade. Indeed, we have found a few texts that are against them. One of these is [1], whose authors claim that “interaction is not enough” to ensure efficient simulation of face-to-face contact. However, the Canadian academic community (for instance, the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University) is a strong advocate of online conferences (see [2,3]). Among other advantages, this kind of conference is “family-friendly,” i.e., they break barriers for researchers with family obligations [4], in particular many women [5]. In addition, these conferences overcome the drawback of parallel sessions at face-to-face conferences, at which participants must choose certain talks and miss others. Anderson and Anderson [6] even put forward environmental and economic arguments: “Transportation is a major contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.” On the other hand, Abdullah [7] and Kear, Chetwynd, and Jefferis [8] look at the matter from another point of view that is also important: Social presence at online conferences