Written by Dr. Dong-Hwa, Chung
Vice President, Asian Pacific Orthodontic Society
The Pandemic And The Beginning Of Confusing Preparations
The 53rd Annual Scientific Congress of the Korean Association of Orthodontists (KAO) was held on November 1, 5 and 6, 2020. In KAO's 61-year history, this was the first virtual conference and it was certainly challenging to plan for this event.
Preparation With Maximum Competence And Creativity
The Congress Organisation Committee started their collection of videos from speakers all over the world and began to produce a lecture compilation with translations. The preparations focused on methods to improve the quality of online videos to provide a clear and interactive lecture presentations. To do this, KAO managed to engage Denall TV (Osstem Implant), which has the latest and most powerful video lecture production platform in the medical field in Korea.
In addition, a full refund of the offline booth sales of more than 50 exhibitors and a new online interface exhibitor advertisement was proposed to exhibitors. As a result, this was a successful model that received favourable responses from both companies and academic conference registrants.
The Congress Concluded With A Good Response
We kicked off the congress with the start of regular academic conference by sending a Pre-Congress program for orthodontists and continuing educational lectures for dental hygienists through a streaming method. On November 5th and 6th, from 9am to 3pm two broadcasting programs ran simultaneously so that the congress registrants can select the lectures they wanted to attend. The opening ceremony and various awards ceremonies were pre-recorded in the separate lecture hall ten days before the congress.
We had lectures from international speakers such as Drs. Jose Mucha and Larry Tadlock and from our local speakers such as Drs. Chun-Yoonsic, Kim-Kibeom, and Sung-Jaehyun. Korea-Japan joint lectures by two speakers from Korea and two speakers from Japan were also broadcasted. In addition to a total of 24 academic lectures, an ‘Ethics lecture’ by Dr. Yoo-Seok Jeong of Dankook University Medical School was provided to allow members to access various interests such as medical philosophy and ethics.
All videos were provided with a chat room option at the bottom of the screen to allow participants to ask questions and to raise any technical issues during the lectures. The online sponsors were also satisfied with their allocated ‘screen-time’ as the organising committee put in a lot of effort for on-screen advertisements in between the lectures.
The success of the first full-scale online conference held in the history of the KAO was based on the full effort of the congress organisation committee. We would like to thank all the members involved in the organising the congress, the lecturers who gave up their time to ensure a successful pre-recording and all the participants and sponsors who were very patient to help us make this event a success.
Looking forward to the KAO-WIOC joint meeting
We look forward to welcoming all of you for the next 54th Korean Association of Orthodontists and the 12th World Implant Orthodontic Conference (WIOC) which will be held at COEX, Seoul from October 14th to 17th 2021.