Abstract:

At present, the whole world is facing the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on heath, economics, society, as well as on all education levels. The pandemic has driven an unexpected change from onsite delivery to courses fully or partially delivered online. As a consequence, development and evaluation of the competences defined for each degree will also be affected by these changes, for which activities and methodologies will need to be re-defined and evaluation processes adapted. Oral poster presentation is a learning experience through which students are invited to acquire both specific and transversal competences which are important in a scientific career. To this aim, oral poster presentation has been part of a “scientific congress simulation” experience in which students of 4th year of Degree in Biotechnology are involved yearly as part of the course “Bioprocess and bioproducts” (Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Agronómica y del Medio Natural, Universitat Politècnica de València). Previous years results have confirmed that through this experience students develop specific and transversal competences related to the biotechnologist research profile such as data basis searching, synthesis of information, results interpretation, deadline accomplishment and time management, as well as oral communicative skills. Due to the current situation, an online version of this activity has been piloted during the academic year 2020-21 with the aid of Microsoft Teams. Presential follow-up by teachers has been replaced by regular face-to-face virtual meetings with each student team. Microsoft Teams has also been used as a platform where uploading students’ deliverables (index of contents, abstract including the entailment of the topic with the sustainable development goals, poster and screencast files). Each student team was asked to record a 5-min screencast to be visualized in a synchronic virtual poster session in front of a panel of experts of three different areas: Food biotechnology, Environmental biotechnology, and Biomedicine. Not only poster presentation, but also interaction with the experts after screencast visualization were considered for the assessment. For the latter, rubrics were specifically developed and shared with the panel of experts. This contribution aims to present the main results of this experience by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of moving this activity from onsite to online, considering both students and teachers perceptions regarding development of the activity, quality of the results, as well as impact on assessment and competence development.

Keywords:

Covid-19, competence assessment, online methodologies, undergraduates, poster presentation.