Hello, again. We are now in the middle of Sonya's self-assessment test of her presentation skills. After doing some reading and research, Sonya may feel a little disappointed. When she studied oral and visual communication skills at college and presented in class, it wasn't complicated or difficult. But right now, she realizes all the recommendations in the textbook seems to be too generic and not quite relevant for her particular situation. How should we advise Sonya? We need to recognize that recommendations are always generic. So, what Sonya really needs is to select a rubric that is generally suitable customize it for her unique situation or just build it from scratch. Let's help Sonya do that. To build a rubric, one needs to identify the most important dimensions and characteristics of the skill that he or she is going to measure. By the way, this is true for any skill. You may want to check skills assessment resources in any area. Take, for example, ballroom dancing and ask yourself how judges assess performance of competitors. You'll find that there is a well-developed list of factors to be taken into consideration, such as posture, timing, line, hold, togetherness and many others and those factors have different weights for different dances. In the readings, we suggest some resources on presentation skills that you may want to check. Also as mentioned, there are excellent courses and workshops to study this subject in more depth. By browsing those and other related resources, you may find that there are several basic rules for developing quality presentations that seem relevant to Sonya's situation, including the overall structure, the meed to respond to the audience, the need to adequately represent the company's vision and mission, the use of visuals and text and the need to get all elements to work together. Based on these findings, you may recommend that Sonya create a checklist of the most important characteristics of a high quality stylish presentation. For example, your checklist may include only five factors. Content, being the corporate message to their key or specific audiences, coherence and accuracy. Style, the overall appearance and elements of the company's style, if they have one. Visuals, such as powerful images in accordance with recommendations of visual designers. Texts, the choice of fonts, size, how many lines per side, etc. Technology, Powerpoint or Prezi animation somewhat kind of effects, then you and Sonya will have to convert the checklist into a rubric. A rubric is basically a checklist where for all factors included in the rubric, levels of proficiency are specified. For example, ranging from zero to four. Where zero indicates no proficiency and four indicates mastery. The next step is to specify full mastery. At this point, you and Sonya will need to identify examples of full mastery in each of the dimensions or better across all of them. Where can you find those examples? This is where another search will be required. Once again, it is a good idea to save the results of this search in the T-portfolio. As a result, you'll be able to specify requirements of full mastery and collect samples of exemplary performance. Everything below full mastery will be graded lower than four. For example, if the best practice is to use no more than 6 to 8 lines of text per slide and font sizes no less than 24. Any presentation that doesn't follow those rules should get lower grades. After the rubric is ready, it is a good idea to validate it and use it for assessing other people's work. There are plenty of available presentations on slide share. Doing this assessment is a skill in itself. This is where you may need to work with Sonya and maybe look up skills assessment in literature. In this course, we covered it in week two. Once Sonya gets comfortable with the use of rubric and understands what full mastery is in each of the elements, it is time for her to assess her own work. For this purpose, she may use some of her previous presentations stored in her e-portfolio. If you, as her coach and Sonya herself will do assessments separately and then compare and discuss the results and possible differences in the evaluations. You both will know for certain what her real level of proficiency is. You may also find out about her strengths and competency gaps, and can even attribute the gaps to the lack of training or experience. For Sonya, there will be several positive outcomes of the self-assessment test. First, she'll get a much better understanding of her standing in the competition. Second, she may think of doing more homework for her interview. She'll definitely be better prepared to answer possible question about how she would approach developing presentations for. Third, she'll know what question to ask Rick, the hiring manager at the interview. Candidates are almost always expected to ask meaningful questions. So Sonya should prepare questions about, for instance, the corporate style, the types of audience and the appropriateness of using fancy technologies like Prezi. She may even prepare some valuable suggestions about how to enrich the company's media strategies. While Sonya is now probably busy preparing for her interview, let's talk between ourselves. Coaches. What are possible pitfalls and caveats of the methodology for job interview preparation that we just described? Here are some of the questions that you may ask. Is it very laborious and not quite practical to prepare and undertake self-assessment tests? How can we make those tests more accurate? How do we know what mastery is? How do we know how a company defines mastery? How can we ensure the accuracy of self-assessment? Can you think of more questions? Can you answer them? If you think about it, you'll quickly figure out this self-assessment is also a scale in itself. And like any other scale, it can be broken down into elementary competencies, researched and mastered. If you do it repeatedly, you'll learn how to quickly assemble meaningful group works and how you can validate them with experts and peers. You'll also see that hunting for full mastery samples in your area of interest will probably become one of your favorite occupations. Collecting mastery samples in any form those occur, like YouTube videos, TED Talks, blogs, et cetera is a useful activity that may become a habit as a result of this course. If you do collect samples, you may want to share them with us and we'll make them part of the course. The final consideration in this presentation is that you should advise Sonya to note her best performances. For example, her use of technology like Prezi is phenomenal. Make a note. Collect samples. Get ready to explain how she does it. Collect opinions of other people to confirm it. This is where having a piece of evidence, such as a personal website or an e-portfolio or just a folder with printed in color copies of her best work can be very handy. Do you think that after your consultation, Sonya will be able to conduct a self-assessment on her own? Let's talk about it in the next presentation.
