To Improve Presentation Skills of the Engineering students through a Vis-Ã -Vis Evaluation Approach - A Pedagogical Experiment

Abstract

Today’s employee has to prepare himself for all possible ways to interact with people, be it in person, video conference, tele-conference, Skype, presentation, etc. It becomes inevitable for today’s aspiring Engineers to jump in for key posts in the corporate world to master their presentation skills. The need for our students to excel in presentation skill prompted us to go for a small experiment with a sample size of 10 freshman students.

After we had a detailed discussion with the stakeholders (HODs, Placement officer, Deans and sample group of students) on campus before revisiting the Professional Communication course content which is delivered to the freshman students; we learnt that our students required an immediate intervention in improving their presentation skills. This prompted us to research and go in for a pedagogical experiment.

This paper talks about the approach that was coined in detail after years of teaching Professional Communication Course for freshman students of Engineering at KLE Technological University, Hubli. We called it The Vis-a-Vis Approach as Vis-a-Vis basically is a French word which means "face to face". This approach was coined keeping in mind as to help the students know themselves and their shortcomings better through a thorough discussion which happens one on one between the faculty and the student away from the class environment after the assessments. The discussion actually begins by getting to know the students and his life and his parents back home and his hobbies. This personal touch opened the gates to make student realize their shortcomings as far as the presentations were concerned more meaningfully.