Assignment 📑

MISC Interpersonal Skills (IPS)

Antje Wild & Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

September 3, 2024

Task

Select two topics, take on challenges, reflect your learning journey & present your findings

You need to choose at least two topics in which you want to improve your interpersonal skills.

During the semester you will deeply reflect on these topics (based on the lectures and your own readings), take challenges that we present during the lectures, and try to improve.

At the end of the semester you will present a reflection on your personal “learning journey” with a focus on the challenges and theories presented and discussed during the lectures and/or with which you have been engaged.

You will chose one topic during the kick-off and another during the course of the module.

Presentation

The presentation must reflect the contents of this course, extended literature and cover answers to following questions:

• Which topics did you choose for your personal development and why?
• What challenges did you choose to grow in the field?
• What changed during the 12 weeks?
• How can you explain the mode of action and effect(s) of the challenge(s)?¹
  –> Literature required!
• What did you learn that you would recommend to others?

The presentation should take min. 8 minutes, max. 9 minutes; a short Q&A follows (approx. 4 minutes).

Grading

The grading is not based on the total amount of challenges you completed or how many of them were on level 3.

We take into account your learning journey, your development over the course and the reflection with regard to the scientific literature.

If you decide to only complete challenges on level 1, however, it might be hard to gather enough material for a good or excellent presentation at the end.

We strongly recommend maintaining a learning dictionary and documenting your progress. Taking pictures throughout your journey can also be helpful when preparing your final presentation.

Important notes

This is a master level course. This means, that scientific concepts and understanding academic papers are valued highly.

While the challenges are the basis for your presentation, the importance of the theoretical reflection is very high. If you did amazing challenges but only read 1-2 papers in your field, you will not receive a good grade. The same applies if you are only citing blog entries, homepages or books. Make sure that you connect your challenges to scientific, high quality papers.

We will do a short intro how to find them.

We will also ask about findings from these papers, so it is important to truly understand the underlying concepts.

Evaluation criteria

An excellent presentation has the following characteristics

Presentation

The presenter is confident and easy to understand
The audience is engaged in an informative and entertaining way
The time was effectively and economically used

Learnings/development

The student shows profound involvement with the challenges
The student clearly presents the results of his or her learning journey
The personal development during the course is comprehensible

Theoretical reflection

The theoretical depth and breadth of the topics is explored
The personal learnings are reflected by (recent) theoretical or empirical findings
Profound knowledge of the topics is shown, even if tough questions are asked

Knowledge of literature

The student has a solid understanding of the cited papers

Submission

You need to upload the slides (pdf) and the articles cited (zip) on Moodle.

• Name the presentation as follows: studentNumber_lastName-preName_IPS-slides.pdf (e.g., 234563_hans-dampf_IPS-slides.pdf)
• Collect all the articles used in your presentation as full-texts (pdf)
• Name the files as follows: author_year_short-title (e.g., Hallegatte_2009_EnvironmentalChange.pdf)
• Compress the full-texts (pdf) of all articles cited in a zip file
• Name the zip file as follows: matrikelNumber_lastName-preName_IPS-sources.pdf (e.g., 234563_hans-dampf_IPS-sources.pdf)

Q&A

Footnotes

1. Why has it (not) worked; what are boundary conditions, what are the results of studies that have employed similar interventions, etc.; we expect you to use further literature, particularly peer reviewed studies wherever applicable