“Ace Your Student Evaluation” Seminar For Academic Staff Of UTAR
UTAR Kampar Campus (8th Feb ’12) and UTAR Sg Long Campus (15th Feb ’12)
On the two days mentioned above, we carried out a seminar targeted towards the academic staff of the two UTAR campuses. We promoted the incorporation of the art of presentation skills to the lectures that were carried out by the lecturers, tutors and instructors. Instead of the traditional lecture presentation methods (which is kinda dry and boring), we managed to “Wow!” the academic staff with our unique method of presentation technique. Developed to be used in the commercial world of sales presentation, we managed to put forward the relevant points in a more interesting fashion, which is guaranteed to maintain the attention of the students attending any lectures, and make them more interested in the subjects that are being taught.
The reception among the participants were very positive, many of whom were quite amazed with the way we put forward the presentation. Of course there was always a handful of those who were skeptical about how a business-oriented presentation style could be applied to a highly academic subject, especially in the traditionally boring subjects like law and medicine. We managed to convince them that if Hollywood can make movies based on law (e.g. LA Law, Law & Order, Franklin & Bash, The Defenders, etc.) and can make them exciting enough to keep your attention glued to the television sets, you can do the same thing with the presentation of academic contents too.
Likewise for medicine, Hollywood also managed to create exciting medical dramas (e.g. Grey’s Anatomy, Royal Pains, House M.D., E.R., Scrubs, Nip/Tuck, Chicago Hope, etc.), and still made them exciting enough to keep viewers coming back for more every week; therefore, presenting medical subjects in a lecture can also be made into an exciting session too.
You may have noticed that we make reference to Hollywood, this was indeed intentional. The mantra that we promote for improving one’s presentation skill is to do it like telling a story (Summer Blockbuster Movies) rather than merely presenting the data (tables, charts, graphs, etc.). If every lecture presentation that students were to attend have storylines, complete with all the actions, romance, comedies, suspense, I’m quite sure that nobody will ever fall asleep in the lecture theatres…
