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The development of oral presentation skills requires multiple opportunities to present and receive focused feedback. In typical discipline-based and general-education courses, class time is precious, and even when oral presentations are part of a course, students may receive only one or two opportunities to present with feedback. Here we describe an approach to develop presentation skills with ultra-short, one-minute presentations followed immediately by brief, supportive, focused, public in-class instructor feedback. Feedback is offered as one positive comment (one thing I liked) and one targeted goal for improvement (one thing to work on). The short time frame maximizes the number of iterative cycles of practice, feedback, and implementation of feedback. This approach was used with students in several semester-long courses offering three to eight opportunities to present. Students took anonymous surveys immediately after the experience and again up to two and a half years post-experience. Over 95% reported that they learned a great deal about how to improve their own presentations by watching other presentations and hearing the instructor’s immediate feedback. Respondents reported lasting gains in skills, increased confidence in their public speaking abilities, and all would recommend the experience to others.
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Public Speaking Simulator with Speech and Audience Feedback
Public speaking is one of the most important ways to share ideas with many people in different domains such as education, training, marketing, or healthcare. Being able to master this skill allows the speaker to clearly advocate for their subject and greatly influence others. However, most of the population reported having public speaking anxiety or glossophobia, which prevents them from effectively conveying their messages to others. One of the best solutions is to have a safe and private space to practice speaking in front of others. As a result, this research work is proposed with the overarching goal of providing people with virtual environments to practice in front of simulated audiences. In addition, the proposed work will aim to have live audience feedback and speech analysis details which could be useful for the users. The experiments via a user study provide insights into the proposed public speaking simulator.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2025234
- PAR ID:
- 10428269
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ISMAR 2022
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 855 to 858
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct57072.2022.00184
