LEARNING TO PRESENT: AN EVALUATION OF THE PRESENTATION LAB, AN ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Learning presentation skills from a book has two major limitations. First of all, it is only possible to show still examples of presentations that illustrate the theory. Secondly, reading often leads to a passive learning attitude, that does not require active use of knowledge from the student. To overcome these problems and to enhance transfer of theory to practical skills, the Presentation Lab was developed, an online interactive learning environment for academic presentation skills.

The Presentation Lab was developed with Wimba Create™ and currently consists of five modules focusing on different aspects of giving presentations. Information is presented within interactive question formats and includes many examples such as sound, movies and images of student presentations.

Does the Presentation Lab motivate students to study the theory more actively? This paper presents an evaluative research to generate a first answer to that question. The Presentation Lab was implemented during a seven week training course in oral presentations for first year students in Mechanical Engineering and Information Technology at Delft University of Technology. Statistic data of student activities were monitored through the BlackBoard learning environment. At the end of the course the attitude of the students to the Presentation Lab was measured through questionnaires. In the discussion of the paper the didactical usefulness will be evaluated and suggestions will be made to further improve the active learning behavior of the students.