Flu-Proofing Your Course: Student Presentations

Maybe you require your students to do individual presentations at the end of the semester to demonstrate their mastery of Spanish past tense. Or perhaps your students are required to do group presentations on a business case study as 20% of their course grade. Suddenly, tragedy strikes! You have the flu during the week that your students are scheduled to present. Even though you feel recovered enough to observe their presentations, you’re still too weak and too thoughtful to actually come to campus. Luckily, there are several options that will allow your students to present, either to you or to everyone in the class. And of course, you can use these tools if your students are recovering from the flu, as well (still contagious, but able to deliver their presentation).

LIVE PRESENTATIONS
Elluminate Live! is a synchronous online collaboration tool. Using Elluminate, your students can upload PowerPoint presentations, present using audio and video features, share Web pages, and share software applications on their computers. Elluminate offers many other features for real-time interactions with your students. Elluminate is available for all NC State faculty to use, and sessions can be recorded for viewing later. If viewing your students is important to the presentation (counseling, pronunciation, public speaking, etc.), you can enable multiple webcams in Elluminate.

It is easy to quickly make and join an Elluminate session, but you may want schedule a practice session a few days in advance of the presentation session to allow you and your students to play with the Elluminate features before the stress of the actual graded event.

To create an Elluminate session, you need to request an Elluminate account.

Second Life is a virtual world community where you and your students can interact by creating avatars, visual representations of yourselves. NCSU has its own island in Second Life where you can virtually conduct classes, and students can upload PowerPoint presentations and present to their classmates. Second Life accounts are free to create, but it does take some learning before you can easily move around the virtual environment. If you and your students are already comfortable with Second Life, this can be a great option for student presentations. If you are not already familiar with using Second Life but would like to incorporate it into your class in the future, you can contact LearnTech at learntech@ncsu.edu to learn more.

RECORDED PRESENTATIONS
If you prefer, students can store presentations online (see options below) which you can review at your leisure. If interaction and discussion is a normal part of your student presentation process, you can still include that by opening a Moodle discussion forum and asking students to post insightful questions or comments. Alternatively, you can start a discussion via email using the WolfWare Classic class mailing list.

There are several options for storing presentations online, including:

• Uploading PowerPoint presentations to a Moodle discussion forum
• Creating Google documents or presentations and sharing the link to it
• Using a presentation storage site such as Slideshare

With these options, there would be no audio or video unless students separately record it. For an online course, it’s an exciting and often fun option to ask students to record their presentations using audio or video. But if you are quickly trying to substitute for a traditional classroom presentation, your students may not have the time or know-how (or energy, if they are recovering from the flu!) to record their presentations.

LOW-TECH OPTION
If you have a small class (less than 25 students) and would like for all students to be present for the presentations, but do not want to use Elluminate, you may want to take advantage of NCSU’s “Meet Me” phone conferencing service. Faculty can set up these conferences by calling the NC State operator at least 24 hours in advance. You will receive a phone number that everyone must call to attend the conference. At least one person must call in from a campus phone, and that person should be the first person to call in to ensure that everyone else can connect properly.

Once connected, students can present audibly. You can also use one of the recorded presentation methods above to complement the audio – have everyone download the presentation to their computer and manually advance the slides themselves as the presenters give their presentation.

Of course, you can combine any of these options to meet your needs. If you need assistance planning your flu-proofed method for student presentations, please contact LearnTech at 513-7094 or learntech@ncsu.edu.

A special thanks to our colleagues at Duke University, who provided the idea for these postings and who gave us permission to modify/utilize their materials for our own campus.