What was your role during the last academic conference you attended? One common answer is “an attendee,” which means that you were there but doesn’t provide details regarding what you actually did. Another common answer is “a participant,” which is only a bit more telling because now it suggests that you were taking part in something. These common answers are widely used, but somehow they only convey that someone goes somewhere and does something. From these terms, we simply cannot deduce exactly what roles the conference organizers, speakers, facilitators, and attendees fulfill.
Higher education has been facing the same problem - the terms “teacher” and “student” imply that one teaches and the other studies. But this leaves the details of roles and expectations to each person’s interpretation. For this reason, there have been attempts to employ terms that are better at defining the nature of the relationship. Metaphors such as “client,” “customer,” “partner,” and “consumer” have been used. These metaphors imply different roles and expectations for every party in the educational system and also how they relate to each other.
These terms are equally applicable to academic conferences. A client means you pay the organizers for a professional service. A customer means the organizers have to please you to get your money. A partner means you partially bear the same set of responsibilities as the organizers. With these definitions in mind, think back again to your role at the last conference you were in: Were you a client? A customer? A partner? Or a consumer?