A weekly online presentation was given to the English Department staff by Lecturer Alan Anwar Hassan, a staff member at the department, on Thursday 24th of December on the differences between Seminar, workshop, symposium and conference:
- Seminar is a small group discussion that provides opportunity for knowledge integration at high level. A seminar tends to be held within one institution or university, and will often a seminar will be a small group of people – say, between five and 30 attendees – who come together to focus on a particular issue. Often seminars will be less formally structured and one person might give a presentation but it will probably be brief it takes between one hour or less.
- Workshop is a meeting during which experienced people in response positions come together with experts and consultants to find solutions to problems that have cropped up in the course to their work and that they have difficulty in dealing with on their own.
- Symposium is simply as ‘a small conference it tends to focus on a particular issue rather than a more general theme. So, a number of experts will come together in order to present their ideas and papers to one another. A symposium is typically completed in a single day. Usually, experts presenting their work and occasionally discussing it afterwards
- A conference tends to be the largest event vs. smaller workshop and seminar. it can between fifty to thousands of attendees, and the largest may host even more visitors than that. It can be of two types: National and international conferences. National conference is typically attended primarily by people living within the country which is hosting the event, while international conference can attract visitors from all over the world. Conference tend to be the most prestigious forms of events as well, so it is the place where one has the opportunity to present his work as a talk or as a poster.