Teaching and learning problem?
BMAN24111 includes a 30% summative assessment in which student groups create and present a research poster about a topical tax issue. Prior to the 2020/21 academic year these posters were printed and displayed, with student presentations taking place in person. At the time of preparing the assessment we did not know whether on-campus teaching/assessment would be taking place, but given many students were not in UK or not intending to come to campus, we decided to have a fully online assessment.
I wanted an online platform which allowed students to easily and collaboratively create a stand-alone ‘poster’, which would look good on screens, could be presented easily on Zoom, and ideally accessed by laptops, tablets and phones (to help accessibility issues). The ease of collaboration was particularly important as many students were in China, with group members in the UK. Given the challenges students were facing in semester 1, 2020, I wanted the platform to be very easy to use with minimal time needed to orientate oneself.
I wanted to avoid PowerPoint so students wouldn’t approach this as a slide presentation. I have used PowerPoint and Publisher in the past for research posters but it can be quite technically complex and wasn’t certain about the ability to work collaboratively.
The inclusion of an oral presentation allows students to demonstrate the originality of their work, their depth of understanding, as well as showing group working and presentation skills. Having these presentations on Zoom was an easy enough modification, and provided students with the experience (and challenges) of online delivery.
Solution? (teaching innovation / use of tool)
Padlet was chosen as the platform to allow students to create an online research poster.
Padlet is simple to use and allows real-time collaboration, meaning all students in a group can view their poster at the same time and each can edit. Students can add text, images, graphs, tables and links to their Padlet, making it ideal for a research poster. Students can get creative and choose the background picture, font, colours and format.
Regarding administrative rights, because I only had 8 groups I chose the following approach:
- Using my Manchester Padlet account, I set up separate Padlets for each group, which gives a unique web address for each.
- I shared these with the relevant group members using Blackboard.
- Each Padlet remained ‘secret’, meaning they are hidden from the public and only those with the web address can access.
- Visitors were allowed editing rights, which allowed the students to start work on their posters.
- Upon the submission deadline, I took away their editing rights and only allowed ‘reading’ access, so no more changes could be made for assessment and moderation purposes.
The disadvantage of the above approach was that because I am the only administrator, students do not have the ability to change certain features by themselves. If they wanted to change format, font and background picture, I had to do it. This was manageable with only 8 groups. The alternative approach is to add students as ‘collaborators’, however in order to do this, students must register for a Padlet account. I decided not to do this as didn’t want to overwhelm students in a very challenging semester. But with a bigger cohort, getting students to register with Padlet and allowing administrator rights for a set period may be easier to manage.
One student from each group shared their screen (and therefore their Padlet) on the pre-arranged Zoom meeting. Each presentation was recorded for moderation purposes.
How successful was the solution?
Expected benefits
- Ease of virtual collaboration.
- Simple platform to use, with minimal time needed to learn how to use it.
- Presents well on screen.
- Easily accessed across different technologies.
Actual benefits
As above. Posters were visually effective, worked well on Zoom and received overall positive feedback from students.
Student reaction
‘It was difficult to put our part on padlet at first, because we could not move them in the way we wish. Once we moved one padlet, others would just move together randomly.’
There were a few teething problems with the use of Padlet, particular when students chose to use the ‘wall’ format. This format isn’t ideal when arranging content in the Padlet. This is reflected in the quote above. However, the same group said:
‘We love our final work! We all think we did well in presentation and we also edited padlet well finally.’
One student commented they were frustrated that work would be deleted by group members in error. See below regarding giving guidance on this.
Guides / tips
Encourage students to engage with Padlet as early as possible, to build their confidence. This was difficult and despite early and frequent reminders, many students only engaged a week before the deadline. If running this (or similar) assessments in future, I will show Padlet on a near weekly basis in tutorials.
Advice students to not use ‘wall’ format as very difficult to order content. Most students found ‘shelf’ format most effective, and if running this (or similar) assessments in future, I may insist that students use this format.
Give students guidance, or allow discussion about how to work collaboratively using Padlet. Because all group members can edit the Padlet, it may be useful for each group to create some protocol about what content they can edit and when. Some groups found it useful to take charge of an individual column to avoid confusion.