The Digital Student Showcase Finally Goes Digital

Digital CSU is a working group of faculty, staff, and students on CSU’s campus which focuses on digital teaching, digital research, and the use of digital tools in learning and research. A rotating group of co-conveners organize several events each semester. Since 2017 these activities have culminated in the Digital Student Showcase, which provides an opportunity for CSU undergraduate and graduate students to showcase digital research projects they completed during the semester.

Why a Student Showcase?

The Digital Student Showcase accomplishes several goals. Students deserve and are looking for more opportunities to create work which is shared outside of the classroom and provides value beyond their grade. But what venue or audience exists for the archetypical research paper or other typical assignments, beyond the classroom itself? Three movements in higher education are coalescing that are encouraging faculty to develop assignments and curriculum which engage students in producing content that is meant to be shared digitally, as well as doing meaningful work which serves some purpose outside of the class. Digital literacy, which among many definitions can be described as “those capabilities which fit someone for living, learning and working in a digital society” (JISC, 2014), and the idea of non-disposable assignments, which can be defined as assignments which add value to the world and should strive to be findable and useful to others (Seraphin et al., 2019), along with Project Based Learning (Buck Institute for Education, n.d.), serve as a backdrop to the Digital Student Showcase.  

Since 2017, the showcase had taken place in a common area like the Student Center or an atrium in a heavily used classroom building. Students would display their work, in most cases on a computer, and share their process in a poster session format. It was a social event, with faculty, administrators, staff, and other students dropping by intentionally or happening across it while passing by. It was a chance for students to discuss their work, and attendees to ask questions.

When the COVID-19 pandemic caused CSU to cancel all in-person events mid-semester in Spring of 2020, the Digital CSU co-conveners made the decision to cancel the Spring showcase altogether. There was little time to find an alternative solution or promote a new format, and faculty, staff, and students were all navigating a new remote environment in addition to other stressors. However, the decision was made to find a solution for the Fall 2020 showcase, to ensure that students still had the opportunity to share meaningful digital projects. This case study will describe the work involved to plan, coordinate, and market the virtual showcase, decisions made along the way, tools used, and lessons learned.

Going Virtual

The decision was made early on to convert the event into a virtual showcase. With the uncertainty of what attendance would look like and the amount of effort that would go into planning a synchronous virtual showcase, the Digital CSU co-conveners opted to make the showcase fully asynchronous, with no actual event taking place. While this meant missing out on the personal experience of students being able to present their work to attendees and other students, there were several benefits. Students’ schedules were not an impediment, and for any students who might shy away from public presentations, another barrier was removed.

To collect submissions from students, a Microsoft Form was used. Student names and contact information gathered, as well as basic information about the assignment and a short reflection on the project. Microsoft Forms specifically was chosen as student IDs and names were collected and needed to be kept in a secure, institutionally managed system. The form also worked well as multiple people needed to be able to access the submissions, and this provided an easy way to coordinate between individuals by sharing the resulting spreadsheet. The form also required virtual confirmation of permission from the student to archive and display or link to the work, in the form of a copyright release.

To display and archive student work, Digital CSU co-conveners selected the Michael Schwartz Library’s institutional repository called EngagedScholarship, a subscription which uses the  Bepress Digital Commons platform. Digital Commons is the leading Institutional Repository software and allows easy archiving and curation of faculty and student scholarship. Collections of content can easily be created with different metadata schemas and the items in the collection shown together as an online gallery. This allowed the metadata collected from the Microsoft Form to be matched to metadata fields for the student submissions in the EngagedScholarship collection. Content is discoverable in Google and presented as individual archive records, so consistent metadata makes for better visibility and more easily read descriptions of student work.

• 

• 

Planning and Promotion Timeline

Email promotions to faculty went out several times during the semester to faculty from an official library email system. The Digital Student Showcase was framed as an opportunity for students to share their work and for faculty to try something new in their classes. A due date of November 23^rd was initially chosen; this would provide staff the time to process submitted works to be ready for a live gallery on December 7^th. It was later decided to change the language in the call for submissions to indicate that there was no hard due date, but that submissions received after November 23^rd might not be posted by December 7^th, so as not to discourage possible submissions.

• Initial promotion email sent to faculty the 6^th week of the semester, end of September.
• Reminder email to faculty sent 11th week of the semester, early November
• Submissions encouraged by November 23rd, the 13th week of the semester
• Library website promotion after initial November 23rd due date to encourage more submissions
• Showcase went live on December 7th, the 15^th week of the semester.
• Library website promotion for the showcase gallery in EngagedScholarship on December 7^th.

Processing of the submissions involved input of the form lines into the Bepress Digital Commons repository. Per American Accessibility Act non-discrimination requirements, actual file uploads to EngagedScholarship needed to be checked and modified to be made accessible and readable as part of the University website. For the most part, this meant ensuring that any images used included alt text, but would also have required video or audio to include transcripts. Most of the submitted items were hosted externally and thus did not require ADA compliance (although it was encouraged).

Asynchronous Benefits and Challenges

While the virtual format worked well, and we now have a permanent archive of student work, we did miss the live interactions from the face-to-face event format. It would be possible to create a synchronous version of the event online where student participants each have their own breakout room and attendees can drop into different rooms to interact in real-time. This has been weighed as an option for Spring 2021, but no determination has been made to go this route. It would put more pressure on students submitting, and rather than all being in a communal area on campus surrounded by peers, they would be isolated in their own breakout room. An optimal solution for an asynchronous event would be a platform that would allow for viewers to interact in some way with the student works, by way of “likes” and comments.

Lessons learned

One unanticipated complication was that of group projects. Two individuals submitted group work. Because the work was being posted publicly, we had to follow up with the student to get permission from the other contributors. There will be clear instructions for those submitting group work that coauthors or contributors must essentially submit together or get written permission from their group members to submit on their behalf. Initially, we had anticipated a greater number of submissions and built-in processing time between the due date and launch date for the gallery. Although this language was altered to allow for submissions after Nov. 23^rd, it may have had an impact on the total number of submissions. In the future, there will be a later due date to encourage end-of-semester project submissions. In general, more robust marketing and a marketing calendar will be utilized in the future. While the scheduling of email messages was planned at the beginning of the semester, other marketing was planned less intentionally, including the creation of banner images and blog posts for the library website to promote the finished gallery.

I would also point out somewhere that this gives students a stable URL for their project that they can add to portfolios, resumes etc.

Reflections

All in all, there were 16 projects submitted, from 16 students across how many courses or disciplines?. While in-person events in the past would normally have had more student participants, this number still provided a broad range of projects. In addition, there were three short films submitted, and submissions from disciplines normally not featured (like Engineering). This showed perhaps a wider reach than in the past and was a welcome development. As of Dec. 22^nd, there were a total of 117 hits to individual student entries. Going forward, we would like to see more student submissions, with even more disciplines represented. While we hope to return to an in-person showcase as soon as possible, the online archive component will be maintained. Benefits of the online component included the potential for more participants, as well as more attendees than an in-person event. As a bonus, students are provided an online record of their work.

Works Cited

Buck Institute for Education. (n.d.) What is Project-Based Learning? https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl

Jisc. (2014). Developing digital literacies. http://web.archive.org/web/20141011143516/http:/www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/digital-literacies/

Seraphin, S. B., Grizzell, J. A., Kerr-German, A., Perkins, M. A., Grzanka, P. R., & Hardin, E. E. (2019). A conceptual framework for non-disposable assignments: Inspiring implementation, innovation, and research. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 18(1), 84–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725718811711