Effective Poster Design Workshop - My Thoughts

I ran the ‘Effective Poster Design’ workshop yesterday for the first time. Not only was this the first time I had run the session, I was also being observed by our Quality Enhancement Manager. Learning Services are striving to improve all of the services that it runs, this includes aligning itself with the appropriate professional standards.

I feel I am as an important cog in the engine room of a student’s uni life-cycle as a lecturer on any of their modules. Learning Services is an integral part of the student journey so it is important that the support staff are able to be measured not only against their peers, but to professional standards. We are aligning ourselves with the professional standards taken from the UK Professional Standards Framework (UK PSF) from the Higher Education Academy. It is also important that we run comparable workshops across the three teams within Learning Services, Librarian, Academic Skills and Technology.

To support this, I have this week been sitting in and peer observing my colleagues, this has been very beneficial. To see how they run their session, pick up tips and to share my thoughts and ideas.

The UK PSF states our workshops should:

• Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities.
• Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunities for learners.
• Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development.
• Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice.

Before the poster workshop I had completed the workshop lesson plan and forwarded this to my observer. I find it interesting as well as a little bit worrying when creating a workshop lesson plan, hoping that the timings for the activities are correct.

The workshop itself, to me, ran very smoothly. I had nine attendees which was more than booked onto the session. This was actually a good thing, there is one part to the workshop where the attendees are asked to create a mock-up poster in small groups. As it turned out, the attendees were mainly from two subject areas, both had poster assessments due.

This session is aimed at good design practice rather than the actual how to off using a computer application to create the poster. Before the session I was concerned that the attendees maybe expecting to be shown how to use an application to create their posters.

My mind was settled when at the start of the workshop I asked around the room, what their expectations were, I was pleased when the answers came back that fitted with my plan. One of the concerns I have it that sometimes I feel I may rush my way through the start of a session, speaking to fast. It is only when I look at the time and think I seem to be halfway through the session and I’ve only been going ten minutes.

This workshop lesson plan does help with that worry, the plan has built into it, points where I ask the attendees for their thoughts. This did help me keep a better, more natural pace and I feel the session flowed very well, so much so, that the timings were spot on.

A new feature that was added to this workshop was at the end, before signposting the attendees to further support models, was to ask for their feedback. I handed out a post-it note to each attendee and asked them to write on one side, one thing they have taken from the session. On the other side, to write one thing they felt they still needed to know.

This turned out to be a very useful exercise, having looked at the post-in notes subsequently, the session has met its intended learning outcomes. The theme of the comments regarding what the attendees have taken from the session was that they now understood the structure of an academic poster and how they should be laid out.

The theme of the opposite side of the post-it note was mainly around the use of technologies to enhance the posters. Towards the end of the session I showed how technology can be used, this included a brief mention of QR Codes, but concentrated on augmented reality. This showed how digital multimedia material can be ‘embedded’ onto static printed posters.

I will offer a further session to attendees that would like to incorporate this technology into their assessments.

Overall, I really enjoyed the workshop, the flow seemed to fit the timings and overall the attendees took something from it. Below you will find the slides I used for the presentation:

Would you like to know what workshop Learning Services are running in February?

We've just changed the way we manage our workshop bookings and announcements. This has been informed by feedback from the Learning Services Team, and participants. To see what we is available in February, see

• http://ucslearningservices.eventbrite.co.uk

If you'd like to talk through if a session is right for you, pop into the Library and ask.

Becoming an effective presenter.

This is a short TEDx talk from Laura Sicola with some interesting ideas and tips on how to establish a more 'Executive Presence' while talking to an audience. The video does take a slight leadership context however these rules and tips are extremely useful for becoming an effective presenter. For instance, reading your audience and adjusting your vocal presence to suit.

 This resource will prove useful for the 'Becoming an effective presenter' workshop.

Learning Services release three online workshops for December 2014

The Learning Services team have released three online workshops for December 2014. The topics are;

1. Getting started with information sources
2. Essay Structure
3. e-Portfolios for the reflective learner

How are the courses managed?

The online workshops are managed through the Coursesites platform by Blackboard. In the majority of cases they are open to anyone. However, some of the courses are for UCS student and staff only, as they use UCS software or require UCS accounts. The courses which are UCS only are clearly labelled "UCS Only".

A number of the courses at tutor lead, therefore, these have set start and end dates. These are clearly labelled "Tutor Led", and will include the start and end dates, and a sign up form. The other courses are student led, and self paced.

All of the courses integrate other online support materials and how to guides, including Learning Service's Assignment Toolkit

What do I get for completing the course?

Inline with our face to face workshops, as recognition of successfully completing the online course you will be awarded a certificate and open badge as recognition of the skills and knowledge you have acquired. More information see the video below (a short story about open badges)




How do I enrol on Learning Services UCS: Study Skills Online (lsucssto1)?

The courses are being taught using CourseSites by Blackboard, an online platform for organizing and securely sharing course materials, online lectures, discussion and other learning activities. To request enrollment into the courses, follow the steps below:

• Launch a browser and enter the following URL to the course home page: https://www.coursesites.com/s/_lsucssto1
• Once at the course home page, click the Request Enrollment button.
• Enter a valid email address and your full name in the corresponding fields.
• Optionally, edit the Subject.
• Optionally, edit the message. The name you enter in the Full Name field will be automatically entered into the signature of the message.
• Click Submit to send your request.

Shortly after, you will be sent to you a course invitation. Follow the link to confirm and register. When signing up, take note that you can register using existing account information from popular web services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo and Windows Live to make it easier to login.

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If you would like more information, please email learningservices@ucs.ac.uk

Designing effective presentations: Getting started with Google Slides

The session on designing effective presentations focusses on; the presentation life cycle, storyboarding, the role of the audience, handling questions, your body position, tips around screen design (use of text, bullets, images, video and animation) etc., However, we don't actually create anything in the session. 

Given, we don't create a presentation, and I used Google Slides (if you have a gmail account, you have access to google slide: http://www.google.co.uk/slides/about/). I thought I'd share the following silent movie, I create to demonstrate how to get started with Google Slides.

The background is I'd like to demonstrate the ease of authoring, sharing this with co-authors (group members) and exporting as a powerpoint to submit as your assignment. The key tasks are;

• give the presentation a name
• set the theme and transitions
• insert a title page
• insert a slide with an embedded video
• insert a slide with an embedded image
• inset a slide with some bulleted text
• share the presentation with others so they can edit
• export in a powerpoint format

If you have any questions, please contact Learning Services (learningservices@ucs.ac.uk)

Observations from recent presentations: how can we improve?

As part of the Elevate Team role, we are often asked to record student presentations for assessments. The following are a few observations from a recent set of recordings. The question is, do you do these? and if so, how might you improve your presentations?

The following observations are not exclusive, and are intended to make you reflect on your practice.

• Reading notes - this is OK, but try to use small cards and not A4 pieces of paper. From the observers perspective it is more obvious when reading of A4 than a small card. The use of small cards will encourage you to simply points, and expand. Which will also encourage you to slow down and not rush what you are saying. If you rush, the audience will not follow your argument.
• Positioning - often you need to present as part of group work, so think about where and how you stand when you aren't presenting. Try not to hunch over reading your notes, but stand up and engage the audience with eye contact and smiles.
• Positioning - don't stand in front of the display (projection area) if you are presenting. As an observer, you get in the way, and also it becomes more difficult (without turning around) to refer to the presentation.
• Use of Technology - keep it simple and effective. If slides go wrong it is very confusing for you, and this sense of anxiety quickly spreads to the audience. Think hard about transitions between slides
• The Audience - engage with the audience through eye contact, smiles, and questions. Remember, they need to feel part of the presentation if they are to follow your argument and suggestions.
• The slides - you need to think carefully about the role of the slides, what are they going to accomplish. If you are using them, you need to refer to them. Don't leave it up to the audience to read them and try to connect those ideas to your presentation
• The slides - think about the text and images ... less is more

If we assume you'd like to improve the effectiveness of your presentations, what can you do? We'd suggest, contacting Learning Services for information on the next workshop session.

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With Thanks - Image - http://piciandpici.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/bored-people1.jpg

Thoughts from this weeks workshop programme

Lots of fun with Mind Mapping

I've run two session from this weeks programme (Enhancing Employability, and Effective Presentation) and really enjoyed the use of MindMup (http://mindmup.com) as a means of collective ideas from those attending. I was particularly pleased when I asking what they wanted from the session, when one attendees said, learn how to use the tool you are using to collect and manage our ideas.

If you'd like to know more about MindMup, it's referenced within the following slides.


Getting organised with RefWorks

Halfway through the Learning Services workshop week and it’s time to get organised with RefWorks.

Finding a way to keep track of and organise your sources of information can seem daunting at first but RefWorks can help, and anything that helps must be good. RefWorks seamlessly integrates with our online resources, converts your references into UCS Harvard, UCS APA or Footnotes and can generate a bibliography for you.

Wednesday’s workshop covered setting up and customising your account, creating folders and organising your references, where to find referencing help, importing from Summon and a database, 360 linking and creating your bibliography.

The group included a mix of levels and subject areas, some students had knowledge of resources beyond Summon and some were just at the start of their studies, for this reason I selected Proquest Central as the database to use for importing references into RefWorks. I also felt confident that I wouldn’t have any technical difficulties as the products come from the same company. For the majority of students the export worked, but for a handful there were technical issues where we waited for RefWorks to respond.

As is the way with mixed groups some students forge ahead with confidence while others take a little more time and while most databases are straight forward to use Pubmed is one of the exceptions - so it was good to see that the students who queried how to use Pubmed with RefWorks managed to work out how to do it from the hand-out, this gave me the opportunity to help those who needed it.
Everyone managed to get the basics covered, but there were a number of additional tools and topics that we could have covered if there had been time, creating an entry from scratch, installing Write-n-Cite (a tool to integrate RefWorks with Word to manage in-text citations) and RefGrab-it are just a few - maybe a second session on more advanced techniques is the answer?

Finally, how might you start thinking about enhancing your employability through a more effective online presence? The following, might help, and arrange to see a member of the Careers Team.

If you have any questions concerning the workshop programme or other development and suport opportunities, please email learningservices@ucs.ac.uk