Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR courses

Guidance and resources to support EPICUR course development, cc-by-sa

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Poster / Presentation

Why use posters and presentations for course assessment?

Posters provide visual representations, which can stand alone or can be accompanied by a presentation. Using a poster as a method of assessment, can provoke students’ creativity as they review the considerable graphic design opportunities. Similarly, developing and presenting oral presentations introduces speakers to rhetorical and relational skills. The poster-presentation combination requires a different mode of presenting to slide presentations. The poster may provide the backdrop for the presentation, or the presentation may focus on unpicking the poster’s contents.

Posters and presentations are authentic modes of assessment as they replicate methods of dissemination commonly used in professional settings. Distilling knowledge, selecting the most relevant information and then deciding how to visually represent it are important life skills, which improve with practice. Similarly, presentations in professional settings can range in length from 30-60 second elevator pitches to more extensive project summaries – whatever the length, being able to capture and hold the audience’s attention are crucial transferable skills.

Posters and presentations also lend themselves to group work and group assessments and require group members to co-develop additional skills including active listening, negotiating meaning, clarifying purpose and managing respectful disagreement. The wide range of skills developed by preparing and delivering poster-presentation combinations can facilitate inclusion, with more students feeling there is something for them to offer and learn.

7 key points about posters or presentations for course assessment

Consider if the course learning outcomes embrace these assessment methods, what weighting will the assessment give to creative approaches and articulating the student voice? This needs to be clear to the students and examiners to avoid confusion about what is being assessed.
Share clear expectations about the poster’s and/or presentation’s aims, target audience, content, design or style.
Be clear about the additional skills and competences that students can develop by learning how to design posters and present.
Share examples of different ways to achieve these aims and invite the students to identify success criteria. These criteria can be supplemented by the course educator, signaling to the students what is most relevant. They can then apply these criteria to their own preparation and outputs.
The graphic design involved in producing posters and presentation slides can be very time consuming, especially when students are novices with these assessment methods. Whilst templates can limit creativity, there may be times when imposing parameters is necessary to help steer the students’ efforts towards high quality content.
Encourage students to plan how to hook the audience in from the start. There are different factors which contribute to an effective hook including the presenters’ body language, tone of voice, clarity of speech, enthusiasm for the topic and rapport with the audience as well as the visual aids, such as slides or posters. Images stay with us longer than what we hear, so those first impressions are important. Guidance on presenting, such as from the University of Leeds shared below, would be useful to share with students and help reduce their anxieties.
Presenters can hone their communication skills by understanding how to include ethos, pathos and logos in their presentations (see the Presentation tools below). Practising in front of a mirror or supportive friends can also help.

Posters / presentations for course assessment in practice

Presentations

Expert in Team Innovation (EIT), a compulsory course for students at SDU’s engineering faculty includes a range of learning activities and assessment tasks including two group presentations. During EIT, teams of 5 or 6 students work on the same theme, often a challenge-based problem provided by a local or international company. This external stakeholder involvement authenticates the task and can be a strong motivator especially as in some cases a team’s innovation proposal is followed up by a company. The course guidance about the design of the presentations confirms that they will be pitching to the company’s representative and that they must be receptive to feedback from all attendees.

The Phase-1 Presentation marks the transition from the analysis phase to the qualification phase of the innovation process. Each team pitches to their peers, the teams’ facilitator and a representative from the relevant company, referred to as the intended recipient.

The Phase-2 Presentation, scheduled towards the end of the course marks the transition of their solution to their intended recipient. The Phase-2 Presentation is an oral presentation of their proposed innovation to their intended recipient. The teams get feedback on the quality of their idea from peers, facilitator and, if relevant, company. The feedback given at the Phase-2 Presentation should be used to further strengthen their Innovation Report.

By framing the presentations in this way, the students are made aware of their purpose and the intended recipient. This clarifies the target audience to whom they are pitching and reinforces the authenticity and relevance of the presentations. Receiving feedback from peers, facilitator and the company representative requires the teams to be open to feedback and to apply the feedback in meaningful ways to the Innovation Report.

Posters

This interdisciplinary course, part of the 4th semester bachelor program for civil engineers with about 60 students, focuses on land development in urban areas. Students work in groups of 4-5 on a theme project. Two Associate Professors conduct a teacher-controlled poster session where drawings are displayed on the walls. Each group acts as a peer group for the others. Students and teachers co-construct criteria for the peer feedback session before the poster session. This method provides specific formative feedback on each group’s drawings, which the teachers cannot do due to the large class size. It also prepares students for their future profession, where they must evaluate and implement feedback on their colleagues’ work.

Displaying drawings

In the elective course on road construction, part of the teaching will involve students bringing their technical drawings or hand sketches of the intersection. These drawings will be displayed, and those who created them will present them briefly to the entire class, which consists of 10-15 people. Afterwards, the other students and the instructor will ask about the chosen solutions and provide their comments. In this way, the entire class will see different solutions to the same traffic problem, and all students will hear the feedback the instructor has for all the drawings.

Links to resources for posters / presentations as course assessment

Presentation tools – guidance prepared for engineering students who present in groups and individually during their courses. The tools include guidance on body language, how and why to incorporate ethos, pathos and logos into presentations and much more.

University of Leeds, UK, provides guidance on posters and oral presentations

Guidance on poster design from Science.

London School of Economics provides this guide for teachers on posters for course assessments

References

Howard, Colin (2017) The Role of Posters as a means of Summative Assessment. University of Worcester, UK. Available at: https://rteworcester.wp.worc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/the_role_of_posters_as_a_means_of_summative_assessment.pdf

Innovative Assessment

Author(s)

This resource sheet has been co-written or written by

Donna Hurford (SDU)
Steffen Kjær Johansen (SDU)
Camilla Fogh Larsen (SDU)
Gry Green Linell (SDU)

Related Resource Sheets

Next steps

If you need further support with developing your course, please contact your local teaching support unit.
If you need further information on offering your course for EPICUR, please contact your EPICUR institutional coordinator.

Contact Details

Local teaching support units

EPICUR Institutional Coordinators

Adam Mickiewicz University
Karolina Choczaj
karmench@amu.edu.pl

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Nikos Kouloussis
nikoul@agro.auth.gr

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Michael Zacherle
zacherle@kit.edu

University of Amsterdam
Tiffany Boersma
t.a.boersma@uva.nl

Universität Freiburg
Charlotte Langowski
charlotte.langowski@zv.uni-freiburg.de

Université de Haute-Alsace
Léa Ziri
lea.ziri@uha.fr

Universität für Bodenkultur Wien
Nicolas Fries
nicolas.fries@boku.ac.at

University of Southern Denmark
Ida Thøstesen
ilt@sdu.dk

University of Strasbourg
Pascale Nachez
pnachez@unistra.fr

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Further use as OER explicitly permitted:
This Resource Sheet within the Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses was created by Donna Hurford, Steffen Kjær Johansen, Camilla Fogh Larsen and Gry Green Linell, University of Southern Denmark.
Please attribute according to TASLL rule as follows: Poster / Presentation (Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses), by Donna Hurford, Steffen Kjær Johansen, Camilla Fogh Larsen and Gry Green Linell, University of Southern Denmark. Any icons included are protected by copyright, © The Noun Project, used with permission.
License: This work and its contents are – unless otherwise stated – licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .