Posters - Literature Review

Why do posters make good assessments of learning? From my personal experience of using it in two courses now, I found posters had some benefits such as:

• Encourages students to be creative in presenting material in a limited space.   
• Is a hands-on way of learning.  Students can see their work unfold and often begin to self-critique rather than wait for feedback from the instructor
• Forces them to be focused on the theme of the poster because it requires them to be succinct
• Motivates them to work in smaller segments of the poster which is critical when it is group.  This makes the task more manageable
• Helps to distil ideas and present them in a visually appealing way.  Creating a mock helps to ensure there is a flow to the elements
• Lends itself to peer and anonymous evaluation.  

Online posters or interactive posters can incorporate other elements making them more relevant to higher education

• Video clips from interviews conducted by the students during the course of data gathering 
• Links to other relevant websites or research
• Append data files to support data analysis

These factors help to make the assessment robust and complete

Posters have some challenges too.  

• Content elements of the poster needs to be well defined, without which the poster can become a trivial activity.  Instructor needs to legwork before setting up the assignment
• When using posters in the context of higher education, anonymity of business/people should be discussed and maintained if deemed necessary.  This is particularly the case when conducting studies relating to quality problems, management studies etc. 
• Rubrics need to well designed to balance content, creativity and presentation which can be challenging

 Some of these facts are further evidenced in articles found on these links.  

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/methods.html

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/38093/1/c38093.pdf

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/MTED_1_Zevenbergen.pdf

http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/case-studies/using-poster-assessment-to-facilitate-learning-and-skill-development.pdf?sfvrsn=6

  

Implementation Plan

The context for this implementation is creating interesting and challenging assessments for students.  As all good teachers do, the quest is to create an assessment that ensure learning continues to happen when students work on it - an assessment for learning and not of.  To enable this, a good practise that I like to adapt is designing feedback points to ensure that they are on the right track and.  Working on small chunks of the assessment at a time makes it less daunting for students - a modular approach from my days as a programmer!

Having used posters as an assessment once - quite sceptically, I was quite satisfied with the way it panned out. It required students to summarise their research/case study, to be succinct in their choice of words, use visuals to highlight findings and more important be creative.  A natural extension of this format would be to use an online poster for an assessment in a course in Quality Management.  Students would develop a poster with a supporting summary document to identify a quality problem in an organisation, examine the impact, analyse cause and effects and suggest a solution.  With a bit of preliminary research, I decided to use Glogstere  a popular tool with educators.  It seems very easy to use and I was impressed with the body of work done mostly by school students.  Although, I have not seen too many examples of its use in tertiary education, it seems to have the potential.

I'd like to follow up with a literary review of posters as learning/assessment tools in general and the potential of graphical and interactive blogs as emerging technology tools.  A short survey or a focus group meeting with students is part of the plan to obtain their feedback and incorporate it into my evaluation.

That's the plan.

Education without Boundaries

Jan 2018

Course GE 480 - Entrepreneurship

Course Objective: Develop a business plan for a global venture

Students: From Dubai, Shanghai, Singapore, Vellore and San Jose

Online tools to be used: Various

Virtual Platform: SecondLife

My first assessment involving students from locations all over the world! Finally for me academia was catching up with the real world. Students from more than one location, collaborating to create a business plan for a global venture. A first one for me! This assessment would offer students the experience of working with members from different cultures, work ethics and expectations. Of course they would work in different time zones as well!

To manage this project successfully students would be required to brainstorm over virtual media, manage collaborative efforts and documents, conduct market research for different markets, develop products and services to that would meet requirements of customers from all over the world. Not an easy task. I have conceived that students would use various digital tools like the online video conferencing facilities for conducting meetings, micro-blogging tools for market research, online project management tools to track the progress of their project and document management sites for collaboration. Reviewing the profiles of students enrolled in my course I could see that they could do this in a heartbeat. What I am really excited and anxious is about simulating the business in a virtual world.

In SecondLife, students could set up their business, make and sell their products, test responses from customers, train their employees on product features, experiment with look and feel of stores, test their marketing strategies. The list is endless. A whole digital platform to enact the business plan before going out into the real world. What a hype could be created. Users in the virtual world would learn about the business model and feedback into the real world!

How would this work out? Would students take to the idea? What would my role be? Would they get so cocooned in a virtual world that they would be unable to cope with the harsh realities of the real world? How would they deal with criticisms from strangers in a virtual world. I have no answers because this is uncharted territory for me. But hey, what is an entrepreneurship course without a few risks? I am good to go..

My Personal Learning Network

I'm a bit word weary now and hope this picture speaks for me.

One of the tools that I like to use is a mind map or a brainstorming tool. Helps me figure out my stormy mind. Creating this has brought out the fact that I do not use webinars as effectively as I should. So during this upcoming PD week at work, I will attend one.

Now there is a plan..

A bad day for teachers and students is when YouTube doesn’t work.

But for different reasons of course!

On a more serious note, in the last three years, I have created a virtual life of myself, the teacher. A life that began for the purpose of connecting with old friends, making new ones and stalking family on Facebook has grown to be a part of my profession live as well. I have begun using YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google, avatars and timelines regularly in courses that I teach. And the experience has only added to my own growth as an educator.

The most obvious benefit is becoming familiar with social media tools that are widely used by businesses in the UAE/world today. As an educator, I believe that I need to embrace these tools to ensure that students can be a part of such emerging trends. Mostly I have used these to help students understand advertising and viral marketing, technology based solution for businesses, use of social media in customer service, use of collaborative tools etc. While the opportunity to get students to appreciate their application in the classroom has lots of potential, there are a few mundane challenges and questions that come up.

First of all there is the learning curve accompanying the learning of a new skill, which is probably the easiest of challenges. There is the always an element of doubt about how students would take to such learning. Is it culturally acceptable to use these in the class room? How do you deal with situations when the wrong ad or the wrong image or inappropriate language surfaces on a page? How does one monitor participation in a collaborative learning activity. How can you ensure that the content is learnt just as much as the tool? What is a good rubric to assess such learning? Where are the best practices?

I could go on... What is necessary is a community of practice which would lighten the load of one teacher’s learning and create a body of resources through collaborative efforts.

After all as educators if we do not take the initiative or have the curiosity and imagination to innovate how can we impart these skills to our students?

Teaching - my personal articulation.

Teaching to me is like organizing a party – in fact a series of parties for the same set of guests.

Each course for me begins with a plan. No matter how often I have taught a course, I go back to the drawing board to chalk out a road map. A lesson that I learnt as a programmer – never write code without writing the algorithm.

My planning would include breaking down learning outcomes into packages and creating a learning schedule. I would also consider introducing something new or topical into the course, changing the sequence of how outcomes are delivered, modifications to learning material etc. Assessment strategies are planned to include a variety of assessments. Formative assessments and learning activities are planned – in most courses I like to be prepared with material one week in advance.

This is a little laborious at the onset, but I find myself quite in control when guests arrive so to speak. Once a plan is in place, I am comfortable planning the delivery of the lesson itself. Depending on the course this could be anywhere between 30 minutes to 3 days ahead of the lesson.

Each lesson I would then plan for a blend of theory and application. One without the other is either too boring or not challenging enough. Fortunately early in my career, I taught courses in Database Design, Programming and Systems Analysis. By their very nature, these subjects lent themselves to teaching theory and practical simultaneously. Now I am transferring these skills to the business and management courses that I teach. I use discussions based on case studies to apply concepts learnt. Finding case studies specific to this region is a challenge, but having working students in a class helps.

A party is no fun without some banter, humor and guests bonding into smaller groups. In my opinion, learning must be fun otherwise it becomes a dreary activity to the learner. I try to set a relaxed tone in class but with some ground rules – particularly with the younger students. My best lesson is one where students settle into their groups and are working on a task. I would walk around helping the groups or a few students helping their peers. Or there would be a good discussion related to the topic that we just studied with students engaged and happy to express their opinion. Or when students begin to connect the dots and piece together all that they have learnt to produce a piece of work that reflects what they have learnt.

The best planned parties or courses can start to go awry. In such a case, the ability to recognize a problem and having time to reflect on the happenings is necessary. It also helps to have a mentor or a colleague to discuss issues. I have learnt to that making small changes in time is necessary to steer the course back into order and inject enthusiasm back into learning.

Unlike a party, a course has a tangible outcome – grades. Much as I dislike pegging students into predefined slots, it is feels great when I see progress that some students have made and immensely sorry for those that did not. Good teaching and learning is all about pride.

This explains why I don’t have much enthusiasm to organize many parties at home!

A memorable learning experience.

A few years ago at the behest of a friend, I enrolled into a cake decorating class. The opportunity to learn something totally disconnected to what I did for a living made it exciting. Visions of me baking scrumptious cakes and making them look oh-so-beautiful made me say yes almost too soon.

The course was due to begin in a couple of days, so I did not have too long to change my mind. I signed up for the course and was duly informed of supplies to be bought to practice skills at home. There would be homework!

Classes got going. Students were all women, from various walks of life. Each of us had varying experiences with baking but were newbies at decorating. A level playing field! The teacher was fun and put us at ease as we worked our way through confectioners’ sugar, meringue powder and what have you. At the end of two hours, we had iced our cupcakes. Over the next few sessions we learnt to make icing, sugar roses, piped flowers and borders. It was a whole new art.

There was homework to do as well. So weekends were spent creating the perfect rose, creating great looking icing etc. Smells of crisco and sugar pervaded my kitchen, relegating smells of curry powder for a change.

What made the experience memorable for me? It was very hands-on and practical. We learnt by observing, trying it ourselves and then practicing at home. Soon our skills and confidence grew. Learning was fun as there was a lot of humor - we laughed easily at our mistakes. While we had to demonstrate that we could replicate our learning outside the classroom, there was no pegging our creations to predefined criteria. There was a sense of accomplishment of having learnt. The teacher was a facilitator, sharing her experiences and knowledge. This made it a very learner centered experience.

This leaves me with a question. Should we be having more courses in academia where the objective is to learn and not be measured?