Background
Seminar on Project or simply Seminar is an integral part of VIII semester engineering course. The idea behind this academic activity is to encourage student to come up with an interesting topic connected to academics and make a presentation to an entire class. The entire process of seminar is expected to help student on how to choose a topic; research references to prepare the content for presentation and finally help him get rid of "stage freight" by making presentation to the class.
Choosing a topic is one of the most defining moment of seminar process. It is so because there are too many topics to choose from. Additionally for a faculty to see the there is no overlap or duplication of topics is a daunting task. Just imagine a class strength of 120 and the process of checking for duplication and even after choosing a topic each student has to come out with an "abstract" of his seminar topic to be approved by the concerned faculty. A seminar abstract to be approved must indicate two or more references consulted during the preparation of the abstract. So far students were asked to submit the seminar abstract on paper and it was very difficult for a faculty to check all reference.
Our Experiment
For the year 2007-08 we adopted a web-based approach to conduct the entire process of seminar. We asked students to submit seminar abstract along with references via email. We insisted that references must be URL's so that we can verify them at once. Submitted abstracts were read in email form only and references were checked by clicking through them. Duplicate Seminar topics were detected using "search within mail" feature thus reducing the work usualy assocaited with paper based abstract submission.
Once the seminar abstracts were accepted students were asked to prepare upto 15 slides using freely available online presentation tool and submit. Faculty went through the presentation and made suggestion if any and asked students to make the final presentation in the class. Thus paper work was eliminated to 100%.
While our approach simplified our work, it also gave our students to learn using email as means of submitting academic work and also learning using presentation software. The database of all such seminar is maintained is the next batch students are using it as reference.
Seminar on Project or simply Seminar is an integral part of VIII semester engineering course. The idea behind this academic activity is to encourage student to come up with an interesting topic connected to academics and make a presentation to an entire class. The entire process of seminar is expected to help student on how to choose a topic; research references to prepare the content for presentation and finally help him get rid of "stage freight" by making presentation to the class.
Choosing a topic is one of the most defining moment of seminar process. It is so because there are too many topics to choose from. Additionally for a faculty to see the there is no overlap or duplication of topics is a daunting task. Just imagine a class strength of 120 and the process of checking for duplication and even after choosing a topic each student has to come out with an "abstract" of his seminar topic to be approved by the concerned faculty. A seminar abstract to be approved must indicate two or more references consulted during the preparation of the abstract. So far students were asked to submit the seminar abstract on paper and it was very difficult for a faculty to check all reference.
Our Experiment
For the year 2007-08 we adopted a web-based approach to conduct the entire process of seminar. We asked students to submit seminar abstract along with references via email. We insisted that references must be URL's so that we can verify them at once. Submitted abstracts were read in email form only and references were checked by clicking through them. Duplicate Seminar topics were detected using "search within mail" feature thus reducing the work usualy assocaited with paper based abstract submission.
Once the seminar abstracts were accepted students were asked to prepare upto 15 slides using freely available online presentation tool and submit. Faculty went through the presentation and made suggestion if any and asked students to make the final presentation in the class. Thus paper work was eliminated to 100%.
While our approach simplified our work, it also gave our students to learn using email as means of submitting academic work and also learning using presentation software. The database of all such seminar is maintained is the next batch students are using it as reference.
What Next
We are now pondering over the merits and demerits of approach we adopted last time. What were its good aspects/bad aspects; to what extent was our approach helped students. Please send u r feedback
3 comments:
This is a very good step forward. Most good companies insist on having everything done online. This is good training for the students who will work in such companies, and will also save time for the faculty. I have one suggestion: ask students to use plagiarism detecting websites before submitting their piece. Faculty can also use one of these for spot checks, but should not reveal which site they are using.
Taking it online certainly gave us much flexibility in terms of time. I remember, i had submitted my seminar PPTs a ni8 before my presentation. lol. And i received the response well within 15 min.
A suggestion would be., Since the presentation was conducted just for 10 min with 15 slides, a presenter could hardly throw the light on the topic. I feel that, the presenter should be given sufficient time so that his content could actually make a room in others' mind.
I can the imagine the fate of a single professor handling the seminar. But several solutions can be thought of...
i think it was the best way to conduct seminars..
i didnt hav to worry about submitting hardcopies nd also there was nothing like a last date bt still everything was completed within time..
it was like everyone gave the seminars whenever they felt like..
though initially i ws thnkng how to cover the topic in 10 min, latr i felt it is btr if evrythng is upto the point..
the best part of it ws the marks awarded.. not only me evryone ws elated..
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