Presentation Skills: Improving through Personalized Feedback
Instructor Inquiry
Dear Online Learning Team,
Warm greetings! I’m reaching out for your guidance on enhancing our students’ presentation skills.
I’ve noticed some students facing challenges in this area, impacting their academic progress. As individual feedback sessions are impractical due to class size, could you direct me to institutional resources that offer structured presentation feedback?
Thank you for your assistance.
Best,
Prof. C. M. Innovatus
Online Learning Team Response
We appreciate your proactive approach to assisting students with their presentation skills. Learning to present effectively is crucial for students in higher education, as it hones their ability to communicate complex ideas clearly and persuasively. Strong presentation skills are transferable to any professional setting, enhancing their versatility in the job market.
At Alliant, all active faculty, staff and students have available to them, at no cost, Office 365 for Education, which includes Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more. Thus, we would like to recommend the Presenter Coach feature in PowerPoint which is designed to provide real-time feedback on presentation delivery, including pacing, use of filler words, inclusivity and repetitiveness. It’s an AI-powered coach that offers a private, personalized way for students to practice their presentations using a technology tool that they are probably already familiar with.
Presenter Coach in PowerPoint
Using a microphone and with an Internet connect, they will need to:
- Open their PowerPoint presentation.
- Navigate to the Slide Show tab.
- Click on Rehearse with Coach.
- Begin rehearsing their presentation and receive live guidance.
- Review the detailed report with suggestions for improvement.
This tool could serve as a ‘virtual assistant’ for your students (or you), enabling them to refine their skills independently before presenting in class or via a video recording. In the coming months, we will expand our focus from sharing scenarios and solutions focusing only on Canvas to those that focus on other issues instructors may encounter involving the use of technology in higher education. If you have inquiries in which the solution may possibly be supported with the use of technology, feel free to email those to onlinelearningstaff@alliant.edu. You never know, we may use your question in a future CTE newsletter column, using a pseudonym, of course.