The objective of this assignment is to hone your research and presentation skills. In a seven-minute presentation, you will teach us something or “sell” us something, that is, to inform and persuade us about something.
Usually, you would deliver your presentation live in front of the whole class, but due to our
current circumstances, you will instead be recording your presentation on video and uploading it
to the “Individual Presentation” discussion topic to share your presentation with other students in
the class. Students will watch each other’s presentations and provide feedback. Your presentation should be based on a topic with which you are familiar—one in which you
have an interest. You will gain our interest in it by using the technique of persuasion. Your presentation must have a sense of structure to it—a beginning, a middle, and an end. One
way of ensuring this is to use a good and time-tested structure called the “motivated sequence.”
It has five main components: 1. Attention: Grab our attention and make us want to listen to what will follow. 2. Need: Convince us that we need to know or to acquire whatever you have chosen to talk
to us about. 3. Satisfaction: Let us know the benefits of agreeing with you. 4. Visualization: Help us to “see” what will happen not only if we accept your proposal,
but what might result if we don’t. 5. Action: Complete the process by indicating what we need to do when you finish
speaking.
Note: Your topic will lend itself to these various points to varying degrees—only the first two
points will be absolutely required for all presentations. The beginning of your presentation might
use humour, or it might use a short anecdote. The “need” should contain an explicit or implicit
thesis statement. You will be given a copy of the criteria used to evaluate your presentation. Take a close look at
these criteria throughout the process of preparing your presentation to make sure that you’ll be
delivering your material effectively.
Some Points to Remember:
1. Practice your presentation several times before you record it. Among other advantages,
practicing will:
ensure the cohesiveness of your presentation,
help you to troubleshoot any challenges with content or technology,
guarantee that you fulfill the time requirement,
help you to plan an effective way of ending the presentation, and
build your skills for future live, in-person presentations. 2. When you are on camera, make sure that you are talking to us, not reading. It’s hard to
maintain eye contact on camera but try to find a balance of looking natural and connecting
with your viewers. 3. Use visual aids. There’s room for a lot of creativity in the video format. You could be on
camera for the entire presentation; your visual aid could be a physical object that you hold
up, write on, manipulate, stand in front of, and so on. If you’re a skilled video editor, you
can have images pop up on screen while you speak (see sample student presentation).
Another option is to have a combination of on-camera and voiceover narration. Some
(free) apps to consider using if you’d like to go this route are the Kaltura Capture,
Screencast-o-matic, Adobe Spark, or the Share Screen function in Zoom. (If you know of
others, please share your suggestions with me and with the rest of the class.)
4. You should be on screen, talking to your audience, for most of the presentation. Be
sure to cite the source of any images that are subject to copyright. Don’t overwhelm us
with slides and keep any video clips you include to under one minute in total. Talking for
two minutes and then showing five minutes of video will result in a failing grade. (Yes,
this has happened.) 5. Grab your audience’s attention from the start and tell the members of your audience why
listening to you will be worth their while (i.e., create a need to know).
6. Time (or edit) your presentation to keep it within 5-7 minutes. 7. Whether you’re speaking on camera or narrating over images, structure your presentation
with an effective Introduction, a logical Discussion of your idea, and a Conclusion that
ends in a decisive way. 8. The Conclusion should give us a sense that you have wrapped up all loose ends and that
we will benefit from what you have offered us. Avoid ending your presentation with a
phrase like, “And that’s it.”
