[MUSIC] In this module we'll look at different aspects of academic presentations. We'll look at understanding, researching and planning presentations. Developing visual aids and scripts, and delivering your presentation effectively. We spoke to some academics in the field of communication about types of presentations at university, qualities of effective academic presentations and strategies for understanding and writing presentations. Let's hear what they have to say. [MUSIC] >> There are many kinds of presentations that students have to do at university. And I think it's fair to say what faculty and school you're in. Most units of study, for example, will have a particular type of presentation. That is part of the course, for example, engineers have been known to design a robot type of device. And it's being marked and graded on the basis of its performance. Another type of presentation can occur in the law and the legal world where a student may be asked to present information. As if to a judge, as if to a jury, or as if to an actual member, a participant, person who is coming along to receive advice from the law student. And that person maybe is different as somebody who's had a problem in hospital. Or possibly, potentially, a criminal member of the community. So the range of different presentations that students have is enormous. Furthermore, if you are a healthcare professional, you might have to take on the role of a student doctor breaking bad news to a patient and the level of kind of presentation that you have to have command of is very detailed indeed and those skills can be developed over a period of three or four years. [MUSIC] >> A very Important thing for good academic presentation is the use of your voice. It's really important to make sure that you speak clearly and distinct. Don't speak too fast, and that you take pauses in between what you say. And also making eye contact with the audience. Because the main thing is that the audience has a feeling that you're really making contact with them. Another important thing is not to use too many PowerPoint slides, because that's a mistake that many speakers make, they rely too heavily on PowerPoint when they talk. A third thing is to make sure that you don't just read out your PowerPoint slides or even worse completely read out the whole of the presentation. Because that just makes it really, really boring for the audience. And I guess the last thing I'd like to say is that it's really, again, connecting with the audience. And a good way to do that is to try and interact with the audience. Ask the audience some questions, give them a little task to do, so that it's not just so the audience is passively sitting there listening to you. [MUSIC] >> So, more in more, in classes you'll take at the university, you'll be asked to give a presentation. And one of the challenges you might find is that you can't just reuse what you did in previous years. Put together a PowerPoint, present an interesting story, you have to really tune into the expectations of the audience. Which in this case is your professor and your class. So for a class in say, public policy or commerce, you might be required to present statistics and to block out certain columns and tell the story of what those numbers mean, what are the implications of them. For a class in literature and the arts. You might be invited to use more aesthetic slides and material and really use your voice to convey the argument. So you have to understand the expectations in terms of format and in terms of what is the purpose of this presentation. I'd say that's the number one challenge. I might add a second challenge, which to find out your own argument, and present it with authority. Because we've learned in the past that authority comes from research sources. It comes from someone else. But the presentation is when you get to speak your own position and you are contributing then to new knowledge. [MUSIC] >> Well I would look at the presentation and break it down, actually I'd look at the timing of the presentation. So if the presentation is short, perhaps five or six minutes, you might think that you're going to give an overview of a topic area, and not so much detail. However, if the presentation perhaps is timed for ten or 15 minutes, it gives you a real opportunity to make the presentation overview and pick on a particular topic which you could then spend five minutes drilling down and really explaining and expanding on that topic. Five minutes is a long time to actually talk about a topic. And I would suggest that you could write out what you intended to cover, and then check that when you're actually speaking the written content that you've planned, that you don't go over time, that you take out any over-technically jargonized words, and you replace them with terms that are perhaps more familiar to your audience. [MUSIC]
