Problem of Practice: Student Presentations

In addition to teaching predominantly freshman composition courses, I also teach an introduction to professional writing course once an academic year.  One of the biggest challenges with this course is getting students to adequately prepare for either group or individual presentations where they have to prepare well-designed slides (using either PowerPoint, Prezi, or Google Slides), exchange with the audience via questioning, eye contact, proper pacing, appropriate body language, etc., and giving and receiving feedback.  In the past, I have tried to prepare students and get them practice using various means; for example, coming to individual office hours or designated conference times to rehearse and review the material with me, or going to the campus Writing Center to meet with a professional tutor (who would also film the presentation using an iPad, play it back, and offer critique), or to just have the students record themselves and submit a meta-cognitive cover sheet or reflective essay about what they believed they needed to do to improve.  In each iteration there have been pluses and minuses, hits and misses, ranging from a lack of preparation on the part of the students to technical difficulties with the iPads.  The biggest issue, however, was that students did not necessarily have a sense of the "realness" of the activity; indeed, until you are standing directly in front of your peers in a classroom or conference setting, with all of your slides prepared, and you hit those miscues, those "umms" and "ahs," those little fumblings or quirks, it all just seems like low-stakes practice. 

Over the summer, during Professor Yoder's "Emerging Technologies" course, I became more and more intrigued by the possibilities of AR and VR in my classrooms.  In doing research for her course, I stumbled upon an app from a UK developer called "Virtual Speech," which simulates various workplace and presentation settings, environments, etc. More than that, however, the app measures head movement, records speech patterns, analyzes eye movement, and provides the user with an output of data about how many times they looked at the audience, the pace or speed of their voice, the advancement of slides, etc.  For me, this seemed like a way of potentially incorporating a new and emerging technology (VR) into a professional writing and presentation course.  At this juncture, I have only played around with the app, but I am making its use a requirement of my introduction to professional writing students.  What I hope this course will help me with is flushing out the details of this particular assignment, prototyping and tweaking the criteria, and helping me be able to understand what students need to take away from the activity and the data produce; ideally, in order to modify their presentation behavior so that it improved in front of a "real" audience.