Poster sessions
All participants, whether presenting papers or not, are invited to bring a poster presenting work they are doing which is concerned with improving student learning: research work which is 'in progress', issues you would like to discuss, practices you would like to share, and so on. There will be a display of these posters during a pre-dinner session on the second day of the Symposium. There is no refereeing process for posters, but please let us know if you intend to bring one so that we can plan the exhibition space required.
Advice on preparing posters
- Use your normal word processor, print on an A4 page and have it enlarged
(by any commercial photocopying service) to A1. This will only
cost you about 1 (if you keep to black and white) and will produce
a professional looking poster with the least effort. Hand written
posters look scrappy and may contain too little to be interesting.
Colour and graphic images are not necessary.
- Include enough text to explain yourself and make it interesting, without
forcing you to use too small a print size. 12pt Times or 11pt
Helvetica will look fine once enlarged from A4 to A1 and this
will give you a maximum of 300 words to explain yourself.
- Choose a title which is self-explanatory rather than clever - you have
to attract passers-by quickly. Make your title at least 18pt (on
A4, before enlargement to A1). Below your title, put your name
and institutional affiliation.
- Put your contact information at the bottom, to allow others who are interested to contact you afterwards.At least some of the allocated time your poster is displayed, stay close to it so that passers-by can discuss it with you.
A sample poster is given below to provide a possible model.
How much does training university teachers cost?
Graham Gibbs and Martin Coffey Centre for Higher Education Practice (CeHEP), Open University
The issue
Training for university teachers has become more expensive than in the past because it has more participants, it is lengthier, it is more complex, involving for example individual supervision of action research and other activities outside 'workshop' sessions, and assessment has been formalised and often uses time-consuming methods such as observation and portfolios. These costs have seldom been quantified and, as far as we are aware, have never been compared. If a university was making a strategic decision about how to get the biggest impact for its investment it would have little information to go on.
A costing methodology
A costing method has been developed to allow training providers to answer a series of questions about their programme, on a www based questionnaire, and have calculated for them the total costs per participant. A spreadsheet has been developed which uses standard costing assumptions and which takes into account the following sources of costs: the cost of trainers' time, support staff costs, training facilities, training materials, associated costs, such as assessment boards and external examining, participants' time and/or teaching replacement costs. A data base containing the costing from all users of the spreadsheet will be maintained to allow comparisons between different types of training provision. Links to evidence about the effectiveness of training from a parallel research study will allow comparison of cost-effectiveness. Research Questions Data from such costing could answer trainer's questions such as 'How much does our training cost, in total and per participant, compared with others?' and 'Which components of our training are most expensive?'
Contact information
The costing spreadsheet is available on the Training University Teachers Research Network (TUTRN) www site (http://cehep.open.ac.uk). Contact Martin Coffey (m.g.coffey@open.ac.uk) for further details.