6 Tips for Successful Online Presentations

1. Minimize Graphics

Though well-designed slides may be needed for some content classes, if you want to focus on speaking and delivery skills, try making at least some of your presentation assignments slide-free. Storytelling, demonstrations, and introducing a speaker are all good choices that require no digital images. Demonstrations in particular make it easier for students to gesture naturally, especially if they are manipulating objects.

2. Focus on a Few Skills

Students can be overwhelmed trying to excel in every area, so limit the skills they will be responsible for. For instance, you might ask students to pay particular attention to using past tense correctly rather than producing accurate grammar overall. Likewise, for pronunciation, you could emphasize one or two segmentals that are tricky for your students (e.g., pronouncing th or r) or a skill from your most recent lesson in suprasegmentals (e.g., thought groups). More simply, you can ask students to speak more slowly so they can focus on accuracy.

3. Present Clear Expectations

Whatever requirements you decide on, let the students know what is going to be assessed. Be specific—for instance, you might ask students to incorporate two meaningful gestures or four new vocabulary words. It’s also useful to require eye contact with the camera to keep them from reading a script. If possible, share your rubric with them when you give the assignment.

4. Keep It Short

Limiting presentations to 2–3 minutes helps students to focus on what’s important and reduces stress; it also helps keep things moving along so that students in the audience don’t feel restless.  For some types of presentations, such as introducing a speaker, one minute might be more than enough.

5. Simplify the Structure

Another way to reduce cognitive load is to provide the speech structure. It isn’t necessary for students to be creative—in fact, I encourage students to use a formulaic structure when they are starting out with presentations. Describing a process, for example, works well because the introduction, conclusion, transitions, and overall structure are somewhat predictable. Rhetorical questions (“Have you ever thought about…”) are a good way to introduce the topic, and the conclusion can be a simple summary. The events in the process are listed chronologically and joined with time transitions. This simplification allows students to spend more time on basic delivery skills and accurate pronunciation, and less time on coming up with something clever and original.

6. Give Students Options

Finally, for many students, sharing their video is difficult because of their weak internet connection or shared living area. Sporadically frozen images or background activity and noise during a presentation add more stress for those students. For that reason, consider letting them record their videos outside of class if they wish. That allows them to find a quiet space at a time when there are fewer distractions. If you do choose to let students record their videos ahead of time, that also gives you the options of sharing them in class or asking other students to view them online and give constructive criticism as homework.

These are a few methods I use in my classroom to improve students’ experiences of learning to give presentations online. If you have other favorite strategies, please add them in the comments below.