Instructional design/Online Presentations/Selecting Content

Determine Your Goal
Before sitting down to create a presentation, you should spend time thinking critically about the content you are going to present. Most specifically, you should determine your goal - that is, what do you want your audience to know after they are though viewing your presentation? We can also refer to this as the objective of your presentation. Take a second to really think about it. Come up with one sentence, use an action verb.

Fit Content to Goal
Now that you have the goal of your presentation in one sentence - take a look at all the pieces of information you want to relate to the audience. You want to make sure that each piece of information moves you closer to your overall goal. In addition, make sure that the content stays at the right level. A presentation on how our brains work needs to be at very different levels when the audience is brain surgeons versus when the audience is eighth grade science students.

By looking critically at our content and removing the pieces that do not move us closer to our goal, we create a more efficient presentation. By also gearing our content to the level of our audience, we create a more engaging presentation - this is because our audience is interested in things that add to what they already know.

Let's Practice
Goal: New drivers will be able to identify the steps to pump gas.

How can we adjust this slide to fit that goal?



You should notice that this slide contains more information than is necessary for this particular presentation. Remember - the goal is just to identify the steps to PUMP the gas. Sometimes cutting out extra content can be the hardest part of creating a presentation! There is usually a lot of information we want to give, but when we stick to the goal we can usually trim a lot of extra information. Take a look at how we can edit to make sure we are sticking to our goal:



After the content has been aligned to the goal or objective of the presentation, it is time to organize the content into a structure that will make the most sense to the audience. Click "Next" to move to the second rubric category: Organizing Content.