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Updated in [June 30th, 2023]
What skills and knowledge will you acquire during this course?
Skills and knowledge that can be acquired during this course include mastering fear, developing a creative formula, using verbal and body language effectively, anticipating the room, and improving clarity, structure, and revision in presentations. The course aims to help individuals discover their personal power as a speaker and express it confidently. It is designed to enable participants to deliver excellent presentations and command the room in any situation.
How does this course contribute to professional growth?
The course on Successful Presentation, offered by Prof. William Kuskin, aims to contribute to professional growth by providing pragmatic videos and exercises for effective public speaking and presentations. The course focuses on four themes: mastering fear, developing a creative formula, using verbal and body language, and anticipating the room. By mastering these skills, individuals can discover their personal power as a speaker and deliver excellent presentations.
The course emphasizes that successful presentations do not rely on external factors such as perfect teeth or a deep voice, but rather on skills such as clarity, structure, and revision. By honing these skills, individuals can express their own internal power as a speaker and effectively communicate their ideas to the world.
Upon completing the course and practicing the skills learned, individuals will gain the ability to confidently command any room they enter. This course is also available for academic credit as part of CU Boulder's Master of Science in Data Science (MS-DS) degree program on the Coursera platform. The MS-DS degree is interdisciplinary, bringing together faculty from various departments and is suitable for individuals with diverse undergraduate education and/or professional experience in computer science, information science, mathematics, and statistics. More information about the MS-DS program can be found at Coursera.
Is this course suitable for preparing further education?
This course is suitable for preparing further education.
Course Syllabus
Getting Started with Public Speaking
In this module William tackles the one element that makes public speaking difficult: fear. Unlike writing a memo or designing a slide deck, presenting a speech puts you directly in front of an audience. Public speaking is wrapped up in the fear of immediate judgment and of lasting rejection. Yet the skills of writing and design are exactly the same as those of public speaking: clarity, structure, revision, and above all, storytelling. By applying these skills you can control your fear and take center stage in public. The results will astound you.A Formula For Successful Presentation
Like the Second Module of Business Writing, this module zeroes in on a practical formula for successful presentations. William establishes this structure, and then breaks down it down into modular elements, so the most complex presentations can be created easily, revised effectively, and delivered confidently. Still, no one-size-fits-all outline, no rigid set of rules, is capable of expressing your own personality and unlocking your own brilliance, and so William goes beyond the basic formula to teach you the secret ingredient to public speaking: creativity.Practicing Your Self
We’ve all sat through presentations that had solid content but just didn’t seem to work. Sometimes it’s hard to define why a speaker fails to deliver. The key is practice. Practice is tricky, however, because poor practice techniques actually make a dull presentation even duller—further from the inspiring, passionate experience you want to create for your audience. In Module Three, William redefines the notion of practice as a dynamic process of verbal and physical language, and then teaches you how focus your language to express your personal style of passion. Module Three teaches you to put passion in a bottle and release it when you want.Engaging with the World
You’ve put away your fear. You’ve used the formula to write a clear talk, and you’ve tweaked it with the secret ingredient of creativity. You’ve rehearsed and mastered your personal verbal and physical language. Still, a conference room or a lecture hall is an unpredictable arena, one that contains an uncontrollable amount of variables: the layout of the space, the mood of the audience, the complexity of the questions—these are the elements of a presentation for which you can never fully prepare. How do you actually get ready to walk out on stage? The last module of “Successful Presentation” teaches you how to anticipate the field of the play so you are flexible, agile, and confident. It lays out, in simple terms, how to deal with interruptions and hostility alike, concluding the course by looking ahead to how you develop your own identity not merely as a public speaker, but as powerful individual.
