A POSTER SYMPOSIUM AS A TOOL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSVERSAL COMPETENCES IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

A poster is an effective medium for presenting concepts and ideas in a visual way. With the advantage of being eye-catching and therefore allowing to visualize main ideas in a short period of time. On the other hand, the main drawback is that detailed information is not presented. To overcome this limitation, oral as well as interpersonal skills have to be used. In this article a poster learning symposium experience is presented. This was a joint experience that was carried out in the Human-Computer Interaction course (2011-2012), belonging to the undergraduate degree of Computer Engineering and also to the undergraduate degree of Multimedia Engineering in the University of Valencia. The Poster learning symposium was organized in the following way. Three weeks in advance, of the poster symposium, students were divided into 28 groups of 3 persons (10 groups for the Computer Engineering Degree and 18 groups for the undergraduate Multimedia Engineering Degree) and each group was assigned a topic (there were up to 10 topics) they had to develop and also synthesize in a poster. Also students were given some guidelines of how to do the poster, a set of criteria scores (rubrica) other students would use to evaluate their poster (so they knew in advance how their poster was going to be evaluated) as well as how poster presentation symposium would be developed. In particular for the poster symposium it was set up that one member of each group would present his poster in 10 minutes (presenter), whereas the other two remaining members (evaluators) would evaluate other posters using the set of criteria (rubrica) scores they were given in advance three weeks ago. For each group, the role of presenter and evaluator would change every 10 minutes to ensure that same competences and interpersonal skills were put into practice by all members of the group. It was also set up that each group had to evaluate the groups having the same topic and at least other nine groups having different topic. The main goal of this experience was to provide students with an opportunity to develop collaborative learning as well as transversal competences. The outcome of this experience has been very satisfactory for both students and lecturers: students were very motivated by this activity; lecturers managed that students implemented a wide range of transversal competences. The success of this experience was mainly due to the fact that was organized jointly by the undergraduate Degree of Computer Engineering and the undergraduate Degree of Multimedia Engineering as encouraged a more competitive scenario for students.