SK.BIO.340/341 Introduction to scientific working

Succesfully presented, well done! - Class of 2015
The last class within this 5 year project finally finished their course by presenting their professional scientic posters. Like the 2 years before they were asked to work on the topic of "Bioinvasors in NZ" because this topic is up to date.

In this course the students learned skills for:
- presenting professionally in front of an audience (incl. rhetoric basics),
- setting up a digital scientific presentation based on Power Point or equal software,
- setting up a thesis (writing and formatting)
- working in a lab or outdoors
- getting ready for written and oral exams (biopsychology)
- setting up a scientific poster and present it in a conference simulation with time limits and add-on discussion

In some courses we used video-feedback to bring out the best of the rhetoric skills of the participants.
The StudIP (Learning Management System) tool DoIt supported this course by automatically terminating homeworks like capturing theirselves on an camtasia based presentation (example given at the bottom). The participants were asked to improve their English skills by doing all their homework and speeches in English. Furthermore, we did a literature seminar simulation about given scientic papers to improve the foreign language and the scientific discussion as well.

This course was a 7 week intensive block course with 3 fulltime hours a week and digital homework in between the live sessions. This kind of teaching is called "Blended learning" and was the first course of this kind for the faculty ever.

Poster speeches at the last day of the class of 2015



left to right.: lecturer Ms. Johanna Spaak, Sören, Anika, Régina, Carolin, Ina, Christin, Weronika, Max, Frederik



Conference simulation with poster presentation


The possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) as a severe bioinvasor in NZ.



The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) as a highly endangered species in NZ.


Best practice example of a student, video speech (camtasia captured)