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This goes without saying that you will lose your audience if the contents of your course and presentation are not properly organized.
People make a lot of mistakes in this regard, however, with some key tips and well-tested processes you can design your presentation to keep the audience engaged.
By the end of this article, you will be able to make presentations of each lecture in your online course much more efficiently.
So, without further ado – let’s get started.
Not Enough Preparation
The first and foremost part of organizing your content includes preparation.
While there are many ways to prepare yourself beforehand, the best method is:
Make a list of things you want to add and write it down on a notepad for future references.
How can this process be easier?
You can streamline the process of making your presentation by shortlisting the important topics. You can easily check out everything along the way as you move from one step to the other.
It is quite natural to forget about things when dealing with a wide amount of information.
You can minimize this by:
Creating bullet points of important segments on a notepad.
Preparing yourself beforehand can go a long way when it comes to organizing the content of your presentation.
Scripting your Presentation
Scripting your presentation before you start working on it can help you a lot with figuring out many things.
It can help you with the layout, segment prioritization, tone of words, and even the designs of visuals you are going to use in your presentation.
What are the other benefits of scripting?
You can also determine the amount of time you will take in each segment and adjust it according to the time you have for your presentation.
Besides that, a script can help you with what you are presenting as well.
You can easily keep a mental track of the information you are going to present next and avoid getting off track.
Nearly 75% of the people are afraid of presenting in front of an audience whether it involves physical presence or not.
The Layout of the Presentation
When it comes to any presentation, the layout is crucial to the delivery of information and keeping the focus of the audience at bay.
You can orient your presentation in two ways:
Words and Visuals. Each of these layouts is associated with the type of information your course has.
Choosing a layout according to the environment and the audience is highly important. You should always keep that in mind.
For example, if your course has a word-oriented layout then you can divide the slides into short bullet points.
GoogleKeep is a helpful tool that plays an important part when it comes to keeping a track of things for your presentation.
This will help your readers to sort and read the information.
What to do:
- Shortlist important topics related to your course.
- Carefully divide them into bullet points.
- Make sure that bullet points are short and to the point.
- Organize them in such a way that every point is connected to the next one.
- Avoid mixing visuals with a slide containing a lot of bullet points.
- Use simple and clear words for your bullet points.
- Always use easily readable fonts for your audience.
A cluster of information is often hard to read and makes it difficult for the reader to maintain their focus on the topic.
On the other hand, if you are presenting something with statistics then:
You must organize your presentation to match the attention span of your audience.
Visuals are much better than word-oriented presentations. Because this way you can easily relay the necessary information to your audience.
When it comes to numbers, you should always use visuals that contain different colors and designs.
Type of Audience
Studying your audience beforehand can help you to organize your presentation.
Different audiences react differently to layouts and segmentation of presentations. It also depends on the age group you are going to address.
How to arrange information for different age groups?
You have to organize your material in an engaging way if you are addressing a teenage audience. While for your adult audience, you can arrange your information in a rather detailed way.
Important Fact:
The attention span of an adult is 20 minutes.
You must organize your presentation to match the attention span of your audience.
Segment Prioritization
Segment prioritization is extremely important, especially for official presentations.
It not only determines how the information is relayed to your audience but also impacts how effectively the audience can interpret the shown information.
How to prioritize segments for official and non-official presentations?
For official presentations, you should keep your segments concise. One other thing to notice is that your segments need to be in order with the topic.
Each of the slides should transition and connect to the slide before it.
Smooth transition between topics can maximize learning and ease the process of teaching as well.
On the other hand, for a non-official presentation, you can add some filler slides to engage your audience first and then transition to the topic at hand.
You can easily keep the attention of your audience focused on the topic with this method.
Use of Visuals
Apart from some specific situations, the use of visuals is highly important in presentations.
You can easily deliver information to the audience without being too wordy. Besides that, visuals can keep your audience engaged rather than dozing off or losing focus.
Now that you know visuals are important, the next thing is to assess how to organize them.
Too many words without visuals are bad, too many visuals without any description is even worse. A good presentation has an even mix of words and visuals.
You should use visuals with an elaborate description pointing to each and everything being shown on a graph, chart, or even a line.
Important Fact:
It has been studied that the audience engages more if a presentation has colorful graphic designs to accommodate the text.
Another statistic indicates that 35% of content organizers use vibrant colors instead of normal and dull colors.
Let’s take an example, in the following figure we have shown the same information through visuals and words.
Anyone can tell that the graph is much easier to understand. Moreover, it keeps the audience engaged.
This will not only help you adjust more information in a small space but also help your audience in understanding what is being presented to them.
Important Tip:
Always try to prioritize the visuals before the text. It will help your audience a lot in terms of understanding.
The Tone of Words
The next thing you should keep an eye out for is the use of vocabulary.
Presentations are meant to be informative and therefore, information needs to be shown in a rather understandable way.
You can use simple vocabulary with an authoritative tone to get your point across the room.
On average, people are 22 times more likely to keep their focus if the tone is used in a rather storytelling way. It is mentioned in the Forbes article which you can view by clicking here.
How can the tone help you with your presentation?
It will not only help you engage your audience but also enable you to keep your presentation to the point.
Keeping your presentations simple can help you a lot in presenting them as well. More than often information and important points are misunderstood due to overflow.
Simple words can help you a lot in minimizing this problem.
Type of Content Used
The type of content used in your presentation can also impact the overall organizing process.
It also depends on the type of audience you are going to address as well.
Different presentations, whether they are official or non-official, require to be organized in different ways.
Here are some examples:
Say you are going present in front of a Thesis level class then you might want to organize your content with a mixture of words and visuals.
On the other hand, if you present in front of a High-school class then you can use bullet points and explain to them as you go over these points.
A statistic shows that the most effective way to organize content is by adding 65% Non-verbal communication (Graphics and diagrams) and the remaining 35% as readable text.
When it comes to non-official presentations, you have the liberty to organize your content to your will.
You can either organize your text first followed up with visuals or you can just visuals before you follow it with your text.
Time Utilization
Managing your time is very important when it comes to presenting something.
Most people prefer that presentations are short and highly associated with the main topic. You can easily do this by filling your presentation with self-explanatory visuals and text descriptions.
This way you will be able to organize your content in an ordered fashion but also save a lot of time while presenting as well.
How do visuals help with a presentation?
You can easily point towards the visuals and get on with explaining your bullet points.
Your audience will be able to make sense of the diagrams being shown to them while also keeping a good focus on your speech.
Narration is an extremely important aspect of an online course. It enables you to explain topics without your physical presence.
A lot of people are often confused by this task due to its multiple-step procedure. However, with a detailed explanation, you can easily add background audio to your courses.
Tips to Organize Content in your Presentations for Online Courses
Following are some tips for you to keep in mind when you start working on a presentation.
- Always start early on your preparation/presentation work. Future alterations can easily mess up your schedule and leave you with less time to work.
- Always use descriptive and self-explanatory visual designs. Your audience should be able to make sense of diagrams by just looking at them.
- Divide your text into bulletins rather than sentences. More often than not, people don’t read sentences and miss information if it’s in the form of paragraphs.
- Always make two copies of your presentation. Store one of them on your cloud drive and one on your hard drive.
Last but not the least, always focus on keeping your audience engaged. Your presentations are for other people and their attention is the most important thing.
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Conclusion
When it comes to online courses, there is no room for mistakes or missing points in a presentation. Such things can render your course ineffective at both the reader and the teacher’s end.
By using these tips, you can easily manage your time and your content. Also, you will be able to form a course that is equally beneficial for an experienced person as well as an amateur reader.
This brings us to the finish line of our article.
We hope that you might be able to adopt some of these tips and make your presentations better for whatever occasion they are for.