It's a poster about posters: how an in-person literacy poster session went online

Abstract

The University of Manitoba’s science librarians developed a three-credit, second-year course entitled “Information Skills for the Sciences” that was delivered for the first time in the fall of 2020. The culminating project of the course was a scientific poster session where students shared their research project as a poster presentation with their instructors and classmates. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the course was moved to online synchronous delivery and all assignments needed to be adapted for the online format. We designed a virtual poster session simulating an in-person event, hosting the poster session on Zoom for a class of twenty students using breakout rooms to separate presentations.

Our poster details the methods used to deliver an online in-class poster session in an undergraduate setting with visualizations to illustrate the experience. Despite the conditions of remote learning, the poster presentation session allowed students to engage meaningfully with the research of their classmates demonstrating that an exciting end-of-semester event like an in-person poster session was possible in an online environment. We discuss the challenges we encountered creating the poster session as well as our reflections on what worked and what might be improved in the future.