Using assessed presentations

When designing your assessed presentation, make sure that you refer to your unit and course intended learning outcomes (ILOs) to clarify what knowledge and skills are being evaluated.  A presentation should not be a test of digital skills or design skills unless this is a stated learning outcome.

Make sure students are provided with appropriate guidance about how to approach the presentation and the expected format of the presentation.  This will help students understand exactly what they will be assessed on and how to access technical support if they are being asked to use new or unfamiliar tools. 

• According to your ILOs, are you assessing the content or the delivery of the presentation or both? 
• Does the presentation need to be oral, visual, or visual and oral to meet your ILOs? Could students pick an approach (e.g. in-person live or recorded podcast) and still meet the outcomes?  
• Is the presentation assessing digital skills or quality of powerpoint design? (If so, this must be part of an existing ILO).
• Is only the presentation assessed or the process of teamworking, researching, and reflecting too? 
• What is the purpose of the presentation (e.g do students need to inform, instruct, demonstrate, motivate, or call to action?) 
• Which technologies are your students expected to use and have they had previous experience with them? 
• Is there a target audience in mind? 

Clarity on assessment criteria will help students recognise the weightings of any assessed elements (e.g. planning, project-management, information content, presentation techniques, ability to answer questions, reflection etc.). You can also provide additional guidance, for example, on whether the student’s camera should be on/off during a presentation, which may be affected by factors outside their immediate control such as their internet connection or environment. 

Students should be given opportunity to practice and get feedback before any summative presentation. This could be within the same unit, or practice could take place in another unit. As a example, students could talk through their script/storyboard/plan which distils and communicates the key ideas/arguments of the presentation.

Do you want or need students to do “live” (synchronous) presentations, attended by you and their peers? Live presentations can take place over Zoom or using Teams. Students can share their screen to present whilst attendees can listen and ask questions.  This may be complicated to arrange and deliver, as different time-zones, caring commitments, reliability of internet connections, and suitability of individual’s learning spaces needs to be factored in.

If presenting live is not required in order for students to demonstrate meeting the intended learning outcomes then consider other methods such as pre-recorded presentations.

Instead of presenting live, students could pre-record their presentations. Presentations can be completed outside of class time and shared easily online with tutors and other students, enabling more opportunity for practice and feedback. There’s also no need for coordination of presentation times. If students have done a pre-recording of their presentation (e.g. using PowerPoint of Panopto desktop recorder), then they can upload this directly to Panopto.

Students can view each other's presentations before a LOIL session, discuss/ask questions in LOIL, or post comments/questions in a discussion forum. Students can comment on their own presentation explaining their choices.  Presentations can be shared with other students for peer review and feedback. As markers, you will already have a record of the presentation for marking and moderation.

Choice enables student agency, supporting the needs of all learners by allowing students to pick presentation methods that they feel comfortable with (for example, via screencast with camera on/off). The same assessment criteria should be used, irrespective of the method of presentation. Alternatively, students may have to cover more than one presentation style, but could choose which order to do them in, e.g. present recorded, podcast, present live or vice-versa.

Video presentations can be completed individually or as a group project and are typically given a time limit - as a rough estimate, between 2-10 minutes. Remember that the average person speaks at a rate of 125-150 words per minute. 2500 words is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes speaking time. This does not account for non-native speakers or many neurocognitive (potentially hidden) disabilities. Be realistic about how long students should be speaking for, and how long the audience should be listening/marking for. Conciseness, selectiveness, and efficiency are valuable transferable skills for students to develop when creating presentations. 

Explain how the group is expected to work together to prepare their presentation. Will there be a group mark or individual mark? Or is this a presentation in which individual group members need to demonstrate their own contribution? If you need advice on scaffolding or marking criteria for team-working, please contact your Curriculum Development Officer. 

It is good practice for students be able to create presentations that are digitally accessible for their audience and that follow copyright guidance.

Our staff-facing guidance on copyright issues provides some areas you may wish to highlight to students.