Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?
February 10th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Education, Faculte, Faculte Story, Presentations
For a student – and for most professionals – being able to give a good presentation or pitch is a key element of success.
Some elements can be learned through reading theory; how much text should you use per slide? How many slides are appropriate? How should your slides be structured? You can even read theory about how you should walk, talk, stand and dress, in order to make the right impression on your audience.
There is one thing, however, that only comes with experience; the knowledge of how you react to holding a presentation. Will you be able to stick to the script? Do you take detours; and where do these detours take you? Will you keep a fluent pace, or will you let your nerves get to you? Even when you are well prepared – and experienced! – your nerves can play tricks on you, and you end up rushing through the whole presentation, skipping several important points – or spending all the dedicated time on the first few slides, thus never reaching your conclusion. Not to mention all the unnecessary uh’s and ehm’s that tend to jump out of your mouth when you are nervous.
For the fall semester 2009, the Master of Science and Engineering Management Class at Marquette University used, for the first time, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio for their final Presentations. Approximately half of the groups chose to create and pre-record their presentation using Faculte, while the rest distributed powerpoint slides only. All presentations were posted on a class website, and some of them were Presented live.
Instead of me telling you how the experiment went, I will let the students do it in their own words:
“In the future I would attempt to use faculte first rather than using powerpoint.”
“I enjoyed the Faculte presentations much better than the non-faculte presentations. The Faculte presentations seemed to flow better.”
“The overall process significantly added to the quality of the presentations. If students/teams used this for all their projects, additional quality gains would accrue.”
Clearly both the students and the Faculte team were pleased with the results!
When I talked to Professor Polzcynski right after the live presentations, he had made a couple of observations that I found particularly interesting. Usually, with my theatre background, I have always claimed that “being live, in person, on stage, always gives the best results”. However, I think the Professor proved me somewhat wrong.
First, he told me that in one of the groups all but one student were traveling through work. The one student being present not an accustomed presenter, and strongly disliked being in front of an audience. Imagine his relief that their whole presentation was already created, and all he had to do was click a link and press play!
The second observation the professor shared was this: When you do a recording, you have the chance to review your work. This means that a) you write a good script and prepare well for the recording – you will actually have to listen to your own voice! and b) you re-do it if it is not good.
This resulted in the groups using Faculte having presentations that were within the dedicated time, following a comfortable pace, explaining all important points, not de-touring into unimportant details – not to mention, without the uh’s and ehm’s.
The professor said that all the presentations were good – but in the groups that used Faculte, there was not a single incident of student’s nerves or unpreparedness getting in the way of the presentation.
Knowing how you react to holding a presentation comes with experience – and I still believe that being present, in front of your audience, gives a good result. However, in using Faculte for your Presentations, you can relax! Be your charming self next to the screen, and let your nerves kick in when it is time for the questions after the presentation.
Unless, of course, you have prepared another Broadcast, with answers to all the questions you might get. Then you’re all set.
Click here to see the student’s Presentations
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