12.3 Presenting Your Project Idea

To present your project ideas to the class, you will need to develop an outline for your assessment and preliminary implementation idea and put it in a PowerPoint presentation that can be delivered to the class audience. This is Milestone 2 of the EME 807 project development.

Because it is quite challenging and time-consuming to have a synchronous session with all the presentations in the class, you are asked to supply your slides with audio commentary, which can be easily narrated in PowerPoint. It may work somewhat better than a video, as in the case of a narrated presentation you can listen to commentary separately for each slide and input your comments right in the file. If you have never done it, it is certainly a neat skill to learn. Please read more instructions at the bottom of this page.

Your Project Outline presentation should contain 5 to 8 slides, including information on the following:

Preliminary title and your name (in lieu of a brief intro)
Main subject: technology, process, or approach – what it is and what it does
Motivation and goals for the project – why you are interested, what benefits are expected
Current status of the chosen technology (readiness), examples of implementation, pilots (if any) and outcomes
Plan for your assessment – what research / analysis do you plan to make your case for implementation
Preliminary implementation scenario: choice of facility, location, scale, potential client (this may not be yet finalized, but you can think of some possible options and let people comment)

Feel free to include some images in your presentation for better illustrating your idea.

The assessment plan should be well-rounded. Apart from technical feasibility, we need to understand the economic and policy situation surrounding the project, and certainly include any relevant insights in environmental sustainability, such as ways the technology helps combat climate change, improve cleanness of air and water, mitigate biodiversity loss etc. Think about what particular aspects of the technology should matter most for the stakeholders you are appealing to in your case of implementation. Some scenarios would benefit from comparing to the baseline technology case (status quo) to demonstrate the benefits of the new implementation.

All submitted presentations will be shared within the class, and each will be subject to peer review by your classmates. As well, as you will have an opportunity to review a couple of other outlines and provide constructive feedback. More explanation of the peer-review process is given on the next page of this lesson.

Instructions for how to narrate your presentation in PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint has the capability to add narration to your slides, which will be suitable for our presentation purposes. It is best if you use a headset microphone, but most built-in mics now also provide a decent quality of sound.

In the top menu, go to "Record" and choose "From Beginning"
On the toolbar that comes up, click the RED button to start recording. You can also choose to keep yourself in the picture as you speak (by pressing or unpressing the camera button).
As the presentation starts, talk over the first slide. You can pause the recording by clicking the pause button any time.
If you need to quit recording and start all over again, press “Esc” (it will still keep the recorded audio up to that point)
While recording, click on the slide or press “Enter” to advance to the next slide. Proceed until you reach the last slide. Pressing “Enter” will stop your recording
Run your presentation in Slide Show mode to check how it looks and sounds.
If you need to make any changes to a specific slide, you do not need to record the entire presentation again, you can just go that slide and "Record" >>> "From Current Slide" and exit recording before proceeding to the next slide.

Note: If you re-do your recording, it will overwrite your previous speech, but the program gives you enough flexiblity to do it slide by slide and fine-tune your delivery.

When you are done recording, you have two options for saving your presentation:

(1) PowerPoint file - this produces a relatively small file, which you can add as an attachment to your post in Canvas. People will need to download the file to their computer to watch the presentation and hear the audio.

(2) MPEG-4 video - this produces a relatively big file. You will have to upload it to a video sharing platform (such as YouTube or Kaltura [1]) and then share the link to your video on the Canvas forum. Avoid attaching the video file to your post - that will force people to download it to their computer / phone taking too much space.

Have fun in the process!