Virtual poster session student and observer data

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.