About the Effective Presentation Skills Tutorial
How To Use the Tutorial
This tutorial is intended for self-paced learning by students in all disciplines and is not meant to be a comprehensive resource on effective presentation skills. Students can view the sections (Preparing for the Presentation, Organizing the Presentation, Designing Effective Presentation Materials, Rehearsing the Presentation, Delivering the Presentation and Handling Questions and Answers) in any order but it is recommended that you complete the tutorial in that order, and take the comprehensive quiz at the very end. The tutorial site does not collect any data on users and their quiz scores.
The content and activities of this tutorial have been designed to be accessible to users with disabilities. Students with particular disabilities that prevent them from reviewing the tutorial or completing the final quiz are encouraged to contact their instructors for reasonable accommodations.
Faculty can use the tutorial as part of their classroom discussions on effective classroom presentation practices and encourage students to review the content and complete the quiz as part of a course activity. But faculty are recommended to review the tutorial fully and complete the end quiz before assigning the tutorial as a course activity to students to make sure the tutorial works properly on local computers and browsers.
It should be emphasized here that the tutorial is not intended to cover discipline-specific presentation practices. Faculty members are recommended to cover such practices in the classroom and refer students to appropriate resources on campus and on the web for more information.
Acknowledgments
The project team would like to express its sincere gratitude to the Committee for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education at Northern Illinois University for its partial funding of this effort through the "Project for Improvement of Undergraduate Education" grant awarded in 2007 to Murali Krishnamurthi, associate professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Substantial additional funding was contributed to this project by the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Northern Illinois University.
The project team would like to acknowledge the contributions of the staff of the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, the Department of Theater and Dance and Integrated Media Technologies at Northern Illinois University for this effort.
Developers
The information presented in this tutorial was organized and edited by the following individuals at Northern Illinois University:
- Murali Krishnamurthi, professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs
- Robert Schneider, associate professor, School of Theatre and Dance
- Alex Gelman, director, School of Theatre and Dance
- Len Lennergard, media production manager, Integrated Media Technologies
- James Barker, multimedia/video producer, Integrated Media Technologies
- Dan Cabrera, multimedia coordinator, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
- Janet Giesen, instructional design coordinator, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
- Olga Urban, online technologies coordinator, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
We wish to also express our appreciation to graduate and undergraduate students of the Department of Theater and Dance, who played the many roles of presenter in the videos.
The following Graduate Assistants at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning contributed to the web design, development and implementation of the tutorial:
- Ishak Majid Shaik
- Krishna Damarla
Reviewers
This collaborative effort benefited from the generosity of the following faculty and staff at Northern Illinois University who volunteered their time to review the draft content and activities and offer their feedback on the tutorial. This effort would not have been possible without their support.
- Daniel Cabrera, multimedia coordinator, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
- Peter Gowen, online analytics coordinator, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
- Jason Rhode, assistant professor, Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment; Director, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
Disclaimer
The developers of this web site acknowledge that the information presented in this tutorial was compiled from several sources including existing literature, online resources and contributions of faculty, staff and students at Northern Illinois University. The developers do not claim the content presented in the tutorial as their own, but have included adequate links and references wherever possible. If appropriate credit has not been assigned to any information presented in the tutorial, please inform the developers at citl@niu.edu so that the necessary corrections can be made and appropriate credit can be given where necessary.
This tutorial is not intended to advocate any particular viewpoint and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning or Northern Illinois University. Users are requested to use the tutorial for educational purposes only.
The Northern Illinois University Effective Presentation Skills Tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.