Rudaí 23 #thing20: Presentable Presentations

Designing and delivering presentations to student groups has been a central part of my role over the last few months. I started working in the information and research team in an academic library in May and from July on the focus of the team was planning the library inductions which were taking place in September. While some of the groups we were inducting were large groups of 200+ students, there were also smaller group inductions to be given to student groups studying specific courses. I run the distance service in the library, which supports students taking part-time, online or in-service courses. The course coordinator asked me to introduce myself to a group of 30 distance students as their point of contact in the library, followed by a presentation with an emphasis on library resources relevant to their needs. She also requested a copy of the Powerpoint slides I used during the presentation so that she could email them on to the students afterwards. I'll focus on my planning and delivery of this presentation for this task today.

Distance students are primarily based off-campus so the presentation needed to focus on accessing the library's e-resources and online services, requesting print books and articles from home and needed to teach the students how to manage their library accounts. We had developed a master template and presentation script for our September 2015 student inductions which covered everything students needed to know about the library in 25 minutes, so I used this as the basis for the distance service presentation. I had to think carefully about what was relevant to this group and edit down the slides explaining how to find books on the shelf, for example - it would be the virtual rather than the physical library that the distance students would be primarily using.

When creating new slides for this student group, I worked with the format already laid out in the master slides so they would look uniform. I added more slides concentrating on the online services available on the library's website - the online tutorials and guides and the subject resources pages. With the larger groups we had only 25 minutes for the presentation followed by a treasure hunt aimed at familiarising students with the library. With this smaller group, I would have 40 minutes to introduce the students to ebooks, ejournals and online databases and would have time to demonstrate how to access these resources on the website, rather than just showing them slides and directing them towards the online guides. We would have more time for any questions that might arise during the presentation too, so I was careful to build the time needed for demonstrations and questions into the presentations. Generally, when giving demonstrations of the library website to students I minimize the amount of text on the slides and concentrate on showing students how to access e-resources step-by-step. In this case I was conscious that the slides would be shared with the students after the presentation so I made sure there was sufficient text in the slides to jog their memories later on. I added two further slides to the original master templates which focused solely on the distance service.

Finally, I delivered the presentation to the group of thirty distance students in a large lecture hall situated on the ground floor of the library. I had given multiple library inductions at this stage but these had all been done with larger groups and two members of the team had given the presentations, taking half of the content each. I would be giving this presentation myself, so I practised it carefully beforehand to make sure that I could answer any questions that students might ask and timed the presentation to make sure that I covered all the content within the allotted time. Importantly, I set up the presentation half an hour before it was due to begin to make sure I was able to access the slides in Google Drive, that the projector, microphone and room lights were working and that wi-fi was set up in the room. I felt that the demonstrations of the library website and of how to access e-resources worked very well. This was the content that would be most relevant to the distance students and it's always heartening to see students taking notes! I felt that a smaller room might have worked better than the large lecture theatre for this smaller group, however. Though the students sat up towards the front of the lecture hall, I feel that perhaps a smaller room would have been a better choice to put the students at their ease quicker. They were happy to ask questions and I was glad I had investigated any issues I was unsure of myself beforehand so that there were no questions that took me by surprise.

I felt that the presentation went well because of the amount of planning that had gone into it beforehand. It was crucial that I had adapted the content to the distance service students, making the material relevant to them. Practicing the presentation beforehand was key too, as switching from slides to demonstrations of the website has to be done smoothly or there's a chance you will get flustered and your concentration will falter. Being familiar with the distance service information was also important - there had been some changes to the distance service loan rules for example and it was important to be able to explain these to students. If I could change anything about the presentation it would be to book a room more suited to a smaller group, rather than the large lecture theatre I chose. Finally, just being confident about the content of the presentation came across in its delivery. The less reading from slides and more eye contact with students you manage the better and I felt that that helped to build rapport with the students in a short amount of time.

Here is the link to the presentation - because I have a hotmail account I was able to use 'Onedrive' to upload the presentation, make it public and generate a link to it that others could access. It took a little time to work out how to do that so others might appreciate this how-to link.