Stand Tall and Raise Your Voice! A Study on the Presentation Trainer

Abstract

Abstract. The increasing accessibility of sensors has made it possible to create instructional tools able to present immediate feedback to their users. In order to study how this type of instruction can have an effect on learning, we created the Presentation Trainer: a prototype designed to help users to develop their nonverbal communication skills for public speaking. In this paper we present our work in progress on the Presentation Trainer, which includes two user studies. The studies showed that participants would gladly use the Presentation Trainer to prepare for oral presentations, and pointed out to some considerations required for the design of tools able to effectively support a complex learning task through immediate feedback.

Presentation Trainer, your Public Speaking Multimodal Coach

“…If on top of this we want to give her feedback, we have to carefully design it, so that this feedback can actually help her to become aware of her nonverbal communication, adapt it, and use this increased awareness to improve her skills [22]. To support the increase of self-awareness the main graphical interface of the PT shows a mirrored image of the user.…”

“…The tool studied in [3] has been designed to help learners to overcome their public speaking anxiety by giving presentations in front of a virtual audience; this system is also able to make an assessment of some nonverbal aspects of the presentations. The study in [22] showed a tool able to provide learners with some exercises designed to improve their nonverbal skills for public speaking and a dashboard interface giving immediate feedback about some nonverbal communication aspects while learners practice their presentations. This study also indicated that a dashboard interface is too difficult to follow while practicing for a presentation.…”

“…In order to come up with an effective tool to train public speaking skills, we decided to build upon the assumption that immediate feedback is proven to be more effective for training nonverbal communication [16], and that a dashboard interface to provide this feedback has been shown to be far from ideal [22]. Therefore the version of the PT described in this article has the capability analyze the user's performance, and to accordingly select at most one nonverbal communication aspect to be presented as feedback.…”

Presentation Trainer: what experts and computers can tell about your nonverbal communication

“…However, experts did express not to know the length of short and long pauses, since they have always assessed these lengths intuitively without ever measuring them. Some solution to retrieve the lengths of shorts and long pauses is by timely measuring the pauses in recorded presentations (Schneider, Börner, Van Rosmalen, & Specht 2015c). Automatically assessing the precise moment to deliver a short or long pause is currently an unsolved challenge.…”

Can You Help Me with My Pitch? Studying a Tool for Real-Time Automated Feedback

“…Tutor systems presenting support for these skills have already been studied for scenarios such as job interviews [12], [13] and public speaking [14], [15], [16], [17]. These public speaking tutor systems use different approaches and focus on different aspects.…”