Yes, We Teach Presentations Online and It Works: Methods for Teaching Technical Presentations to Practicing Engineers in an Online Environment

We have been teaching technical and engineering communication in a graduate-level online course for over eight years. As part of that work, we advise the students (all are practicing professional engineers) about writing and presenting alike. In fact, the presentations element of the course is unilaterally the most lauded element of that course. However, again and again, instructors interested in teaching presentations online ask us, “How can you do that? How can presentations be taught online?” Our answer is both a complicated one and a simple one: you must have the right setup, the right infrastructure, and a thorough understanding of the students’ mileu and motivation. Lacking the benefit of being able to constantly model presentation techniques in a faceto-face arena for our students, we engage them through a variety of other pedagogical methods and teaching strategies. In addition, because we are constrained by our lack of physical modeling (outside of video, which also has its limits), we have essentially flipped the presentation classroom to have the students do the “real” work of their presentations in their actual engineering workplaces. From small practice exercises (elevator talks) to long on-site and high-stakes presentations, participants come to develop a deep understanding their of audience and goals. There are many moving parts to consider for such work on our part, such as platforms, issues concerning proprietary information, face time, feedback mechanisms, and personal style. There is ample evidence of the success of our model from both student self-reports as well as employer evaluations and feedback. Furthermore, this model is scalable to other graduate technical and professional communication courses. This paper shares techniques we have deployed to achieve success in teaching behind a screen and share best practices for others who use presentations as a means of fostering and evaluating student learning via distributed learning platforms.