Assignment Spotlight: Poster Presentation Activity

Student engagement is always a concern, particularly in online courses. We never want to give the impression that we are teaching a "packaged" course that is being delivered by a robot. There must be some elements of engagement and uniqueness in each course you teach. I like to do this through communication and engaging assignments. In today's blog post, I'll share an engaging assignment I like to use in my online course called the Poster Presentation Activity.

The Poster Presentation Activity is an assignment that asks students create a poster presentation on a particular topic. This presentation is patterned after the poster presentations that might be seen at a scholarly conference. I like to use the guidelines from a conference call for proposals to pattern my assignment guidelines against. This helps students to be familiar with the language used in these environments.

While I typically use this assignment in a Research course, it can be adapted to many different courses. Like most poster presentations, I like to have students follow the format of Purpose, Methods, Findings and Results, but you can change these to any sub-headings that fit your particular course. I would also encourage you to have students get creative with pictures, tables, etc.

Additionally, students can "visit" the posters of other students as they would in an actual conference, and provide constructive feedback.

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