Online workshops on science communication skills
During these unprecedented times of the Corona crisis, e-learning tools seem to be thriving and allow for self-paced education while staying at home.
My colleague Anna Bauer and I, thus, transferred some of our workshops on communication skills for scientists in natural sciences from presence-centered events to an e-learning experience.
We created an e-workshop on giving scientific oral presentations and one on scientific literature search and efficient reading of journal papers.
Both these workshops are created using the didactic approach of cognitive apprenticeship, i.e. we do not only show how to communicate in science but also explain why one should do so and make thoughts and decision making transparent.
The workshops consist of videos, pdfs and tasks.
The oral presentation workshop consist of three parts. The first part is a video on the preparation of a talk including story telling and content. Several tasks within this video allow the workshop attendee to work simultaneously on a future presentation.
The second part gives advice on slide design, to present data and to help to transport the presentation key message non-verbally. The third part reports about personal experiences and advice on presentation skills, including body language, Q&A session, does & don’ts and avoiding stage fright. These two parts are available as pdf files and include some interesting references.
The workshop on oral presentations was also evaluated and analyzed scientifically. The results of this study are published as a SoTL (Scholarship of teaching learning) paper in the journal die hochschullehre:
The workshop on literature search is split into two parts, both available as videos with accompanying tasks. The first workshop part deals with the actual search – search questions, sources, judgment on source quality, search strategies, … An additional pdf gives in introduction to the literature management system Citavi. The second video deals with the structure of journal papers on natural sciences and engineering. It aims to improve the efficiency in reading papers.
All workshop material was created for academic teaching purposes only!