Online Presentations - The Big 5
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By Scott J. Allen & Maria Soriano Young
“The most consistent finding from a literature review is that the greatest variability in student attention arises from differences between teachers and not from the teaching format itself. Certainly, even the most interesting material can be presented in a dull and dry fashion, and it is the job of the instructor to enhance their teaching skills to provide not only rich content but also a satisfying lecture experience for the students.” - Neil Bradbury
Online presentations present both challenges and opportunities. While opportunities include benefits such as enabling you to connect with people across the globe or learning new methods of prompting audience response, difficulties revolve around technology and audience engagement. The good news is that you can manage both with careful thought and preparation (as we examined in last week's blog post). It's hard to get experts to agree on the key characteristics of an excellent live presentation; even informal polling provides scattered opinions of "what matters most" in a great presentation. However, some key elements and opportunities emerged in our research.
Oral Signposts & Clean Structure
Oral signposts help listeners follow the trajectory of your presentation. They are clues that guide listeners through the narrative and ensure that you are progressing through a well-planned and scaffolded session. Phrases like "my agenda for today," or "the outline of my talk," or "this is a really fun concept" provide listeners with essential cues.
Repetition
Similar to oral signposts, repetition is a rhetorical technique designed to facilitate recall and retention of your content. Avoid repetition that is simply repeating for the sake of repeating - hammering in statistics, facts, or phrases through blunt repetition may bore or frustrate your participants. The repetition we support is quite the opposite—carefully placed and intentional use of repetition is a powerful tool, especially if you want engagement. This could mean selecting synonyms for key words or concepts, invoking similar (but not exact) phrasing for ideas or recommendations, or provoking recall by saying, "Remember the image of the rippling river that I showed you at the beginning of the presentation? Visualize that again now…" to get your audience to take action, instead of just showing them the picture again. From a rhetorical standpoint, the Greeks identified many strategies of this technique, highlighted in the article Effective Rhetorical Strategies of Repetition.
Vocal Variety
The vocal variety concept is simple in theory, but difficult to master in practice. Vocal variety underpins great storytelling and serves as an opportunity to use variations in pitch, pause, tone, pace, and volume to engage listeners. Effective vocal variety breathes life into your presentation and keeps listeners engaged. However, the key is to try to incorporate this naturally; forcing yourself to be overly dynamic will come across to your audience as confusing or off-putting. To try and discover what feels most natural, you could try exaggerating in both directions during your practice sessions (and record yourself to hear the playback, too): first, speak in a VERY dynamic voice, where you vary between high and low, loud and soft, fast and slow. Then, deliver your presentation in a flat, monotone voice with no variety, emotion, or even facial expressions or gestures. Once you've heard the extremes, start practicing ways that you can add some of these elements in appropriate places as a way to keep your audience listening and watching.
Word Choice
Presenting online requires you, the presenter, to create the energy. Part of this is done via vocal variety, but we suggest that word choice is another critical element of engagement. Using words that communicate wonder, excitement, frustration, or gratitude will engage listeners in ways that correspond with which emotions you aim to elicit. One caveat is that your nonverbals must align with your words—this is called congruence. For instance, the phrase "I'm excited" often requires a smile to be congruent.
Remember your audience with word choice, too; be careful not to rely on jargon that your audience may not know. Suppose you are speaking with an international audience. In that case, it may be useful to rely on plain language (that is, language that is easily accessible and understandable to those who speak native languages other than English and may have differing levels of fluency with the English language). Try not to overuse idioms or figures of speech because they could potentially muddle your meaning.
Multimodality
When we spoke with Christina Cashin, the Senior Vice President of Talent Management at KeyBank, she reminded us that online presenters should "use a lot of different tools and techniques to pull the audience in." Her assertion was one of many similar sentiments shared by the people we interviewed. We use the term "multimodality" to communicate the need to "switch things up" and not default into one mode (often lecture) for extended periods of time. Adding a poll, a question in the chat, or sharing a quick video are ways to facilitate engagement. While there is disagreement on how long it takes for people to "fade," we try to adjust the energy level every 7–10 minutes.
Presenting online is a new space for many of us. These five tips are considerations to help your message "live" in the minds of your audience. The words you choose, repetition, a clean structure, vocal variety (prosody), and multimodality can help you design an engaging, informative, and memorable presentation.
We explore this topic and others in our new book Captovation: Online Presentations by Design.