4 What to do About Timezones

One of the most rewarding experiences of higher education is meeting individuals from different backgrounds, disciplines, and industries. When creating virtual events, international participation might be already occurring, whether intentional or not. For example, many international students will continue to attend school while living in a different time zone from their academic institution. Other times, events are created with the specific intention of bringing students together globally. This can present a variety of logistical challenges to short-duration learning experience planning. This guide will cover two considerations short-duration experience planners should make while preparing for a short-duration learning event.

A short-term learning experience that has a global audience will require virtual components.  Some of these components will be synchronous, where the teaching team will be delivering content and providing mentorship and some of this time will be asynchronous where the student teams will be working, brainstorming, and researching.   Scheduling the synchronous components can be difficult, but it is during these sessions where a sense of community can be built amongst the participants and it is critical to accommodate as many of them as possible.  The level of engagement is not solely based upon the timing of the synchronous components but if some participants are regularly asked to join late at night or early in the morning this can limit their engagement and even cause some of them to drop out.

In planning these events, the first step is to consider that there are various time zones that may be at extreme endpoints. What can someone possibly do when it’s 8 AM in Toronto, Canada, but it’s 5 AM in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia? Identify where different participants are located in the globe and lay out all the different time zones in comparison to one reference time point. One resource which can support this process is WorldTimeBuddy [Opens in New Tab, Website for Managing Multiple Time Zones].  An example table is below for reference.

Consideration 1: Creating Realistic Teams

The best solution is to find a time that is suitable, while perhaps not ideal, for most candidates. This can be agreed on collectively. However, as you can see in the table above, this is not always possible. To tackle this issue, alternating time slots can help to keep a project on track while minimizing difficulties for any one group. For instance, meetings can occur at different times every week, so that there isn’t one group that is disproportionately disadvantaged.

Another solution one can use is to create teams based on time zones. That is, teams would ideally only have a set time difference between their locations, such as a maximum of a three-hour time difference between all group members.  The trade-off to this approach is that it can reduce team heterogeneity. For example, during a global event, this would mean that only North and South American teams would form one time cluster, European and African teams would form another cluster, and Asian and Australian teams would form a final cluster. Logistically, this approach can streamline team formation by using time zone information as a filter during team assignment. On the other hand, this approach reduces within-team heterogeneity.

A third approach to creating realistic teams of varying time zones is to design an education experience which can be handed off between teams. In this case, the idea would be that members of the team would work on different components of a project that could be handed off to fellow team members. Ideally, a branding team could be working asynchronously from a software development team. This approach works best for projects which do not prioritize within-team collaboration.

Consideration 2: Involving Guest Speakers

During the planning phase of a short-duration learning experience, it is important to consider whether subject-matter experts, guest speakers, or esteemed judges will be invited to any part of the event. If your invitees have further conflicting home time zones locations, pre-planning their involvement is the best strategy. Some solutions to maximize guest involvement include asking judges to create a recording rather than live presentations, recording live presentations for participants to watch on their own schedules, or running the same event more than once to include all participants. Failing to consider the involvement of guest speakers ahead of time can lead to frustration for participants and guests alike; as a lack of participation to the speaker can feel like a waste of time, and a guest speaker seeming to favour one time zone can feel unfair to event participants.