Guidance for symposium contributions

You are invited to submit proposals for lightning talks and posters at the 2024 Teaching and Learning Symposium on Monday 17 June (Week 9 TT24). 

The deadline for submissions is 12noon, Monday 13 May (Week 4 TT24). Please note extended deadline.

If your submission is accepted, please follow the guidance below for preparing your talk and/or poster.

Please note all contributors will need to register for the symposium. 

Guidance for lightning talks 

Successful lightning talks focus on a single idea, project or innovation, and are naturally limited in focus.

The audience is thus exposed to a wider range of content and expertise which creates extensive opportunities to make connections across disciplinary and situational boundaries.  

Please limit your lightning talk to five minutes and no more than three slides. For accessibility, please ensure that the font size in your slides is a minimum of 20-point for accessibility. You might like to read our guidance on creating accessible PowerPoint presentations.

To encourage active engagement with the audience, we encourage you to include a key point, perhaps phrased in the form of a question, to leave the audience with.   

Guidance for posters  

Please design your poster with inclusion in mind. Please use the guidelines below to help with your poster design. There will be prizes for the best posters at the symposium, which will be judged by the audience and announced by Professor Martin Williams (Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education), on the day.

Poster size: A1 (portrait), 59.5cm x 84.1cm 

Font: Please use a Sans Serif typeface. Suggested font sizes: 

• Main title: 78-96 pt (bold, title case) 
• Author(s): 72 pt (bold, title case) 
• Affiliation(s): 48 pt (normal, title case) 
• Subheading: 36 pt (bold, sentence case) 
• Body of text: 24 pt (normal) 

Colour: Please use three colours at a maximum. To help people with colour vision impairment, please try to avoid relying on colour to convey meaning. Combinations of red, blue and green may be difficult to distinguish for some people. 

Formatting and layout: Please create margins about 3cm from the edges of the poster. Do not ty to fill every cm of the poster with information; embrace ‘negative space.’ Consider using panels and arrows to direct the audience on how to read your poster, and use sections and headings as appropriate. 

Images and text: Most guidance on poster design advises no more than 350 words in total. We encourage you to make liberal use of relevant and compelling graphics and images to grab the audience’s attention. 

Important: Please include the title of your poster, your name, your department/faculty, citations/references, as well as your contact information and social media tags. You may also like to include a photo of yourself or your team and QR codes to websites. 

We are pleased to offer free printing services to a limited number of posters. Details will be announced soon.  

Please also note we will be including a digital version of your poster on the Centre for Teaching and Learning website as part of the outputs of the symposium. Please provide us with a JPEG file (recommended file size: 7016 x 9933 pixels) by 12noon, Monday 10 June (Week 8 TT24).

What are the key dates for contributors?