In this video, I wanted to give you a sense for what this course is and what we're going to cover. And I think maybe the best way to do that is to talk about our course goals, course assignments, and our course schedule. So presenting information is both simple and it's complex. It's simple in the sense that we're usually presenting information that we already know, so it's about conveying our ideas clearly. But there's the rub, right? We want to be clear because we want to be understood, and being clear is tough. It requires diligence and work. We have to think about how the audience will hear and understand an idea in real time. So at the broadest level, by the end of this course, you should be able to explain complex ideas vividly and excessively, design clear and compelling presentations and presentation slides, and speak dynamically conveying your passion for a topic while maintaining your professional credibility. That's the objective. That's a big objective. There's a lot in there. So let me go through each of those chunks. So first, explain complex ideas vividly and accessibly. So I would say, one of our chief challenges when presenting information is figuring out how to bring that audience into a new idea. So what we're going to do in this class is spend a fair bit of time working on how to design audience oriented speeches. How to think about bringing that audience into our topic. Now that's going to require that we use clear language and lots and lots of examples. So that takes us to this next chunk. Design clear and compelling presentations and presentation slides. So arrangement is hugely important for presentational speaking. The decisions you make, make a difference. So if we start a speech without important context, the audience is going to be lost. If we spend to long on content, the audience is going to be bored. If we've got too much information on the slide, the audience is going to have a problem reading it and that slide is just not going to work. If we have too little content on a slide or if its got like a strange image, then the audience is going to be confused. These are arrangement decisions, and in this class, we're going to spend a lot of time thinking through how to design audio visual experiences that are going to help audiences understand concepts in real time. So then finally, we want to speak dynamically, conveying our passion for a topic. As you probably know, presenting information can be boring. But we don't want to be boring, right? So we'll dive into some delivery strategies for interacting with the audience and think about how to perform your genuine interest in a topic. Okay, we want our audiences to perceive us as exciting speakers excited by idea, so those are the broad goals for this course. Now, we are going to achieve those goals through the course assignments. There are three basic types of assignments in this class. We've got a number of different speech assignments, we've got quizzes, and we've got analysis assignments. And right now, I'm going to talk about all of the assignments in the class. You don't need to complete all of these, in order to pass the class, you only need to complete the required assignments and you can see which one's those are by just looking on the website. All the other assignments are there to give you more practice and more options in this class. So let's go ahead and begin with this first broad category of assignments, speech assignments. Each assignment here really emphasizes a specific skill set, so we start off with a pretty short speech, an introductory speech, this assignment allows us to practice good delivery, we'd practice a pair review system. Get a reminder on how to do good speech videos. And then we're going to move on to outline assignments. So good planning is important to good presentation speaking. Now in your outline, you're going to draft up a basic plan for your talk and submit it for peer review. And that way, you can give and you can get some outline feedback. Slides, so slides are a staple of modern speeches. No doubt, you've seen some terrible slides. So before we do our final presentation in this class, we're going to build slide decks. Again, we're going to run this super review so you can see some other ideas for slides and get some feedback on your slide design. All of this is the build to that final assignment, the informative speech. It's the main assignment for this course. Now, it focuses on good content, explaining this clearly, organizing this clearly and delivering it in an engaging, passionate way. We're going to spend multiple weeks building and practicing these speeches, really building to that final speech. So those are the speech assignments. That's that big bucket of speech assignments. The class is mostly about those speech assignments. But we also have quizzes, weekly quizzes. Now these quizzes don't just test your memory, they're also there to help you refine your speech judgement. They'll usually ask you to evaluate different ways of organizing a speech or explaining an idea or designing a slide, but those are the quizzes. Then finally, we've got this category of analysis assignments. Now, I included these because one of the best ways to get better at performing speeches, is to get better at listening to speeches. So in an analysis of time, what you're going to do is watch a speech, evaluate it, read my analysis and the analysis of others. So those are the basic types of assignments in this class. Let's go ahead and talk about the schedule. In the first week, we're going to start off by planning our speeches. So our speeches should help the audience understand something new, and that requires thinking about what's preventing them from understanding that now. Then in the second module, we're going to move on to designing our speeches. So we'll work through a number of different arrangement models there. In the third module, we're going to work on illustrating our speeches. Here, the focus is on, how to make a speech easy for an audience to understand. We'll talk about good examples, clear presentation slides. In that fourth week, we're going to talk about delivering our speeches. How to develop your ethos as a dynamic speaker? How to interact with audience as well? And then in that final week, we conclude the course and this is also when you submit the final speech assignment. So, that's just a very broad overview of the course goals, assignments, and schedule. So, let's go ahead and get working on it. [MUSIC]
