Thanks for inviting me to the party: Virtual poster sessions as a way to connect in a time of disconnection

Abstract

COVID-19 presented the world with trauma and isolation, but many people, including educators, have offered bright spots of creativity and engagement. As we confronted these issues in our own ecology classroom, we sought solutions to carry-forward the learning objectives we set for our students in January 2020, yet encourage interaction with the sensitivity that a pandemic requires. In the rapid transition to online course delivery, we opted to retain the original end-of-semester poster project in our introductory ecology course. However, we experimented with a new virtual platform where students could disseminate their work and communicate with the community. In this paper, we discuss the Mozilla Hubs virtual reality platform that we used for our event. We also collected qualitative data to share the benefits and challenges of this experience felt by the students, the instructors, and external observers.