Summary
This post describes the value of end-of-semester presentations and poster sessions to enhance students’ feelings of ownership of their work, and offers suggestions and considerations for a variety of presentation types.
Introduction
Some courses end with a final project, presentation, or performance as opposed to an exam. In such courses, giving students the opportunity to present to each other or to a wider audience can be a beneficial milestone for your class community as well as improve students’ feelings of ownership for their work. This article will outline some of those benefits, describe different models for such sessions, and offer advice about their logistics.
Benefits and considerations of “going (more) public”
Compared to assignments submitted for instructors’ eyes only, presenting an individual or group final project to an audience of classmates gives students the chance to share what they’ve worked on, be exposed to peers’ approaches to the assignment which might have differed from their own, or demonstrate progress on learning objectives connected to communicating their ideas. If you decide to open up these presentations to colleagues (either as audience members or judges who are assessing particular aspects of the work) or to a more general audience of members of your college, students’ friends and family, or an actual public event or exhibition, students will have the opportunity to describe and present their work in ways that can feel “more real” than the classroom. It might be a more realistic mirror for how students will apply their disciplinary skills or share their activities in the workplace, making it a more authentic assessment. We also think it contributes to student ownership of their works well as their sense of gravity connected to sharing their work to an audience beyond the instructor (Heinrich et al. 2021).
Brandy Ellison, who recently hosted a showcase for her ISS Pursuit of Happiness course, reflected on that course’s December 2025 poster showcase as follows:
“Watching students light up as they shared their ideas for making MSU a happier place at our final poster session confirmed for me that presenting to community members enhanced their growth and learning. It brought a sense of meaning and purpose to the project that would not have been present if it was created solely for evaluation and grading.”
There is the chance that shifting to a more public showcase might lead to more stress for some students who don’t enjoy public speaking or who experience social anxiety. There are ways to ameliorate their experience, including offering them flexibility in creating another kind of public product like a poster, website, or a video they can prepare in advance. Offering more choices can increase all students’ engagement with this assignment. You should be sure to respect any student accommodations connected to making presentations, and offer students plenty of notice about such a project.
We encourage you to make a choice that’s a good fit for your course context. You can experiment with inviting the level of audience attendance and interaction and see whether you notice these benefits.
Models for your showcase
What format options are there?
There are many different models for a more public share-out, included but not limited to the following:
- One or several days of in-class presentations
- A poster session in the classroom or in the hall of your college or another academic space, where students present physical posters and the audience travels between posters
- These can be collage-style posters created by students or ones physically printed on one of the large-size plotters on campus.
- Posters are a common presentation model at many disciplinary conferences and communicating work through a poster within a course can be a great training experience.
- An online showcase of websites, portfolios, or videos of presentations
- These formats can persist beyond the presentation events and can be useful for students’ ability to demonstrate their achievements beyond the course.
- Students can present work for an existing event, such as submitting projects for MSU’s UURAF (University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum) or for a college research exhibit.
Who should attend?
You can invite a variety of audiences. Consider inviting:
- The students in your course
- Multiple courses in a combined presentation session
- This can be coordinated with help from your department or college.
- Specific invited guests
- Your own colleagues who you invite to the presentations, either from within your department/college or elsewhere on campus
- Students can invite specific friends and family
- Students from other courses (as an activity in their own course or for bonus points); you can make this arrangement with one or more colleagues
- Administrators from your college (your Dean or Associate/Assistant Dean)
- The campus community (invited through your network or broader communications)
- The broader public
Roles for audience members
Depending on your choice of audience, you can consider the following roles for some or all audience members:
- Listening to all presentations
- Circulating between posters or projects
- Asking open or specific questions to prompt key student responses
- Suggested questions can connect to learning objectives, student reflections about their experiences, or their biggest challenges and/or takeaways from this project. Creating these meta-cognitive opportunities and the chance for students to reflect on their own process and learning can be very valuable. Many thoughtful audience members will already be asking questions in this vein.
- Giving feedback on all or some presentations
- You can provide a printed feedback form where people can offer quantitative or qualitative feedback on in-person posters, or an online survey for virtual ones.
- A rubric can help to standardize feedback and keep it connected to appropriate elements.
- People can leave short on post-its directly on posters or projects.
- This can be formative feedback, or can connect to an “audience choice” contest with small prizes like coupons for Sparty’s coffee or the Dairy Store.
- If you are connecting audience feedback to portions of student grades, be sure that you have good alignment with your learning objectives, to minimize the potential for any bias, and to be transparent with students about how any grade will be calculated.
- Serving as a judge
- Many of the same considerations as producing feedback (above)
- Judges can have a deeper engagement with a smaller number of projects and share their feedback with you about students’ achievement of assignment objectives
- Judges can be experts in the discipline or can intentionally be non-experts
Logistics
Here is some more granular advice about running a student showcase. Depending on the model you’re following, these considerations might be more or less relevant to your planning and implementation of this event.
- Let students practice presenting to peers with feedback opportunities
- Advertise or communicate invitations with plenty of lead time.
- In the lead-up to the event, encourage your class community to enjoy this course milestone and help them prepare
- As the end-of term is a busy time for students and educators, offering snacks might encourage audience
- Visit the space ahead of time to figure out needs, and plan in time to set up and take down work
- You might need to assemble supplies, including scissors, tape, staples, poster stands, etc.
- Support any printing and/or tech needs
- There is an FAQ for the library plotter. Your college/department might have its own printing options
- Students can upload videos to MSU MediaSpace, which can be embedded on websites. Here’s the MediaSpace help resource.
- Plan the event like a stage manager in terms of what’s happening, where things go, and increments of time
- This can include any opening/closing speeches, special guest remarks, do students get a spotlight of time or is it science-fair style, etc)
- If the presentations are on slides, consider having students all use the same computer to present to reduce transition times.
- They can create presentations in Google Slides and then share a link with you, which I then double-check to make sure sharing is correctly set)
- Create or set clear norms ahead of time. Examples:
- One student or group presents, applause, questions, instructor feedback, closing applause
- Every student has to visit and gather feedback on 10 other posters
- If it’s a gallery walk, providing a feedback mechanism (post-it notes?) for encouragement and feedback can be fun
- During the event, interact with your students and audience members, and monitor the energy and interactions in the room. You can use your judgement for when to intervene to encourage disengaged students or to redirect any disruptions to the event.
Reference
Heinrich, W.F., Louson, E., Blommel, C., and Green, A.R. Who Coaches the Coaches? The Development of a Coaching Model for Experiential Learning. Innov High Educ 46, 357–375 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-020-09537-3
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my LBC colleagues Michele Jackson and Isaac Record for the initial discussion about project showcases and to Brandy Ellison for your input.