Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery (Coursera)

Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery Online Course Overview

Mumbling, stumbling, worrying, trembling, sweating, and fearing are the outcomes of low delivery skills. In this course, we are not going to teach you how to replicate the best bits and traits of the acknowledged speakers. Dumb replication of someone’s successful behavior may help you only to the extent. That extent is the situation. When you are facing a different context, a different situation such as “skills” might not work at all.

Instead, we try to get to the core issues that stand behind the troubles with delivery and start honing your skills from there. Topics we are going to cover:

1. Preparation — how to deal with fear and anxiety
2. Voice, pace, and gesture — how to speak, stand and move.
3. Getting live feedback — how to interact with the audience.
4. Taking Q&A and Improvisation

So don’t meddle, start the Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery Coursera course and make your delivery better.

Course Syllabus

WEEK 1 – Preparation

This week is about preparation. Preparation is the key to dealing with anxiety and fear, various technical, semi-technical faults and live mistakes. We will cover the proper ways to rehearse, ways to deal with faults and mistakes.

WEEK 2 – Voice

This week is about key principles of delivery: how to spread attention between the audience, yourself, and material, how to visualize and feel in order to appear more passionate, how to do semi-warm-ups (if only needed) and how to speak with an audience.

WEEK 3 – Contact

This week is about contact with your audience. Connection with the audience is the most important part of the delivery. No connection — you are talking to the abyss, your message is lost. But there is no single ultimate indicator of whether you have the connection or not. It is more like a cloud of small nonverbal and verbal signs: faces, gestures, smartphones, questions, and so on. So you need to look for, decode, and respond to the feedback.

WEEK 4 – Q&A

This week is about Q&A and improvisation. Q&A’s are risky because you can be caught off-guard and look stupid, but in the same time exciting — live demos are always more fun than screencasts, and important because anyone can memorize somebody else’s speech, but only the author can answer tough but valuable questions. So we are going to cover some basic dos and don’ts and then my proven algorithm of dealing with questions.

Teacher

• Alexei Kapterev