Art of Designing your Presentation for Maximum Learning

Following guidelines on the way in which information is assimilated allow us to derive a number of principles by which presentations, lessons and training courses can be delivered to have the maximum impact:

1) Use breaks effectively - by breaking frequently, you take advantage of the way in which the mind recalls information most effectively at the beginning and ends of a presentation. You can take advantage of this several times within a session, before and after each break. As a guide: presentations of less than 20 minutes in length can be ineffective as it can be difficult for the audience to grasp at the shape and rhythm of the material. Presentations of more than 50 minutes in length are usually boring and ineffective.

2) Take advantage of the high initial level of assimilation and of the heightened understanding of the final facts to present some of the most importance information during these periods.

3) Relate facts that should be remembered to other facts, and fit them into a framework that shows their relevance. If necessary, repeat important information.

4) If the presentation is part of a series, then a brief period of time can be spent before the presentation starts reviewing the overall structure of previous presentations. This helps to refresh the audience's minds with the information on which you want to build, allowing connections to be made automatically which would otherwise be lost.

5) Where possible members of the audience should be encouraged to review information in their own time. See the article on Using Reviews to Learn Effectively for further information.

6) Try to engage the whole mind of your audience and as many of their senses as practicable with a variety of aids. This will keep all of their minds focussed on the learning experience rather than having unused parts of the mind 'wandering off' and generating distractions.

7) Perhaps try to fit the key information to be recalled into a mnemonic structure. This will require that your audience understands and is comfortable with the use of memory techniques - otherwise your presentations may seem a little strange!

Summary:
It is important to design the structure of a presentation to fit in with the way in which your audience recalls and assimilates information.

This involves reviewing information already known, keeping presentations relatively short while still maintaining the feeling of structure to a subject, linking information in with a structure, and presenting or representing key information at the beginning and end of a session.