Creating and Facilitating a Virtual Poster Presentation

Recent prohibition of large group meetings has impacted all of us in academia causing the cancellation of conferences, symposia, college- and department-level faculty and staff meetings, etc. These current restraints have prompted us to think outside the box when it comes to the standards related to Scientific Poster Presentations.

As an IPE student at the COMP-NW campus, the final activity is an in-person scientific poster display presentation.  This is a group assignment in which 252 students from 4 colleges are organized into 28 different groups, and given a recent public health topic to research and present in poster-form.  As you can imagine, social-distancing has caused us to rethink how this activity can be completed given our new proximity constraints.

In an effort to maintain the project requirements, given our current social-distancing circumstances, CETL has developed a Virtual Poster Presentation forum.  During this session we will discuss the process of how this idea went from design to concept to creation.  Come see a real-world hot-off-the-presses implementation and hear about how it was done and lessons learned.

After attending this session, participants will be able to:

•  Describe how website and video conferencing technologies can be utilized  to  present student work to a wide audience.
• Identify some of the advantages of a virtual setting and some of its pitfalls.
• Engage WesternU IT and CETL staffs to create their own virtual poster presentation.