Dr. Emily O’Reilly, Deputy Director of the Online MSc in International Animal Health at The University of Edinburgh, explores the effective use of student presentations to assess online postgraduate students. In her detailed blog, Dr. O’Reilly discusses how oral presentations not only enhance learning outcomes by allowing students to delve deeply into their subjects but also prepare them for professional realities where clear and impactful communication is essential. She highlights the dual benefits of boosting confidence among students and overcoming the inherent challenges of online education through innovative assessment strategies. This post belongs to the Jan-March Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: Engaging and Empowering Learning with Technology.
Presentation skills are an important part of higher education and while these can be assessed utilising a range of authentic assessment types, oral presentations allow students to share information, describe and discuss their research and to do so utilising suitably crafted slides. Presentations are especially important at postgraduate level as they prepare students for professional environments, where presenting is integral to communication practices.
The opportunity to acquire and develop presentations skills (this includes researching and producing the content, creating the slides and delivering the presentation orally), is important in ensuring learning outcomes related to effective communication are met. It also provides opportunities for students to build confidence in communicating in an academic setting. At a postgraduate level students are gravitating further into research environments where the effective dissemination of research findings is a critically important skill. Postgraduate students should be confident communicators with a honed ability to produce and summarise information over a series of slides and convey this information clearly. Presentations also offer the opportunity for Q&A sessions, discussions and further engagements akin to opportunities at conferences and other academic gatherings.
In developing postgraduate pedagogies specifically, the use of presentations as an authentic means of assessment enables students to enhance their familiarity and develop their skills with presentation software such as PowerPoint and apply these to summarise information, convey complex ideas and detail and describe research findings. Visual learning is important and designing slides to convey information and support descriptions allows for creativity and the development of these specific skills set.
Students gravitating towards a research career will benefit hugely from having opportunities to present as would students who go on to work in education, policy and governmental and NGO organisations. Presenting skills are transferrable and highly valued across professional settings. Whilst the value of utilising presentations is clear there are multiple challenges that online students will encounter when faced with undertaking a presentation during their studies (Figure 1).
Some of these are of course not unique to online students, with many on-campus students also experiencing technical issues or anxiety around presenting in front of their fellow students and lecturers. There are however several challenges that once distilled do make for an assessment format that is valuable but particularly challenging for online students. Delivery must be either in a live session on a platform such as Microsoft (MS) Teams with slides shared and the online audience in attendance constituting fellow students and academics (markers) or, the presentation has to be recorded by the student, exported and uploaded to a learning platform such as Learn for viewing and assessment. The online live format is more akin to an in-person presentation allowing for many of the benefits of presentations to be appreciated by both student presenter and audience, with enhanced engagement and direct Q&A enabling an almost fully authentic experience; for a global cohort finding a suitable time would however be very challenging and may also disadvantage some students. In addition to differing time zones, online postgraduate students may have especially demanding work schedules and/or caring responsibilities. The asynchronous learning environment is what draws many students to online postgraduate study.
Recording a presentation does however allow a student to research, produce, design and record a whole presentation for assessment. Whilst there is no audience present, the student can undertake this assessment in an asynchronous fashion meaning they are still able to benefit from the assessment while countering many of the challenges (Figure 1). Technical issues can be addressed with appropriate support and a clear guide. For those students who are especially anxious about presentations, recording may provide an opportunity to build confidence in this area.
To assess the use of presentations a popular 10 credit online postgraduate elective course for the Global Health & Infectious Disease and International Animal Health online MSc programmes: An Introduction to Vaccinology, utilised presentations in a recent revision to its assessments. Students were tasked with researching a vaccine candidate, highlighting specifically how to it could address current challenges associated with an infectious disease or current vaccine(s) in use. Students were advised that the intended audience was a committee from the World Health Organization or World Organisation for Animal Health. As well as availing the opportunity for initial formative feedback on the choice of vaccine candidate, supplementary content on the creation, recording and uploading of a presentation was provided in the form of a step-by-step recorded guide. Students who felt they may encounter challenges (such as those detailed in Figure 1) were advised to make contact with the course organiser. No student indicated any issues with the assessment and all students submitting a recorded presentation. The presentations were of an excellent standard across the cohort and were enjoyable to view and mark.
Moving forward there is significant scope to evolve this assessment. The standout feature of the recorded presentations were the student voices and whilst these were enjoyed by teaching team, it represents a further opportunity for peer learning and student engagement. Being able to effectively communicate to a range of audiences is important and the diversity of the online postgraduate cohorts provides a rich opportunity for students to present to a global peer audience, which is especially important given the global and international scope of both programmes. Further developments could also involve Q&As on discussion boards that follow on from students watching each other’s recorded presentations.
Evaluating these challenges and exploring the opportunities through the online postgraduate lens, it’s clear that the increased post-pandemic utilisation of platforms such as Teams has meant that the global cohort of students are increasingly engaged and available online. The use of recorded presentations for assessment has revealed further opportunities for increasing student engagement and peer review and feedback. Online presentations allow the rich and diverse experiences of the University of Edinburgh’s global cohort of online students to be drawn into the learning experience, it offers an equitable and authentic assessment opportunity that can be appreciated by fellow students and their educators alike.
Emily O’Reilly
Emily O’Reilly is a lecturer in Global Health & Infectious Diseases and the deputy director of the online MSc in International Animal health. She delivers a number of courses across the Deanery of Biomedical Sciences’ postgraduate programmes in areas relating to immunology, vaccinology, AMR, diagnostics and food security. Emily has supervised over 30 MSc projects to date, is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a mentor for the Fleming fund fellowship scheme. Emily’s research interests include AMR, vaccine hesitancy, with pedagogical research focused on digital postgraduate education. Emily is also a keen podcaster and had previously undertaken research into the role podcasts have in online PG education.
Global Health and Infectious Diseases postgraduate alumni (and current students!)
Emily.O’Reilly@ed.ac.uk
