Being The Right Person To Present Your Course Idea

You have an idea for a video course for a medical topic and you have done your research (covered in an earlier blog) to ensure there is sufficient demand. There is now a slightly discomforting question you need to ask yourself: am I the right person to present this?

In this blog, I will talk about how to become the right person.

In general, there are only two things that are needed to be the ideal presenter:

1. Knowledge on the respective topic
2. An ability to engage the audience

Chances are you already know about the topic you wish to present. You might have spent considerable time reading up on it, you might have conducted formal research into it yourself, or you might work in the area and have a lot of hands on knowledge that you wish to share. Any of these will give you sufficient knowledge to make a presentation. However, you wish to be sure you have everything covered and you need to be ready for questions (even with video, where the audience is not directly present, questions can be posted online or sent to you).

Fortunately, it is incredibly easy these days to get the latest on any topic of high end research – even if you are not at a university.

There was a time, when this author was an academic, that one needed access to specialised databases. However, you can now search for the latest (and older) papers on the topic of your course with great ease. There are numerous options – you can read about them here – but the best at this time is Google Scholar.

With this search engine you can find papers quickly with a search of simple terms. You can then quickly navigate to other papers via both the reference list and the cited by list (often the more valuable list). You can then refine the search term to find papers that are most applicable to your area. Even if you read only the abstracts, you can quickly determine latest findings that are applicable.

In about one afternoon, or a few depending upon how much you find, you can cover the major findings of the past decade. Making you a true expert.

If there is a paper that you want to read in more detail, but the full version is not readily available, then you could try Sci Hub. This site is controversial because on the one hand it provides knowledge gained by predominantly public funded research to all, but on the other hand does contravene copyright owned by publishing companies that make their revenue publishing that research.

The good thing about video is that you can have multiple goes to get it right. The bad thing about video is that you will notice every mistake – and want to do it again and again and again.
There will be blogs coming up that will talk more about how to present in your video. For now though, remember the following:

• Talk to the camera or microphone like you are talking to a friend – imagine them there and imagine talking to them. This will give you the ideal tone and facial expression.
• Take it one small section at a time. If you do it in small chunks, then there is less chance of a mistake being made. That means you only need to redo small sections at a time.
• Do all your recording in one session. Your voice does change with time and day. If you record over numerous days, then it will be evident in your final video. This is of course OK if you are doing multiple topics – each like a separate lecture with its own separate video or series of videos.
• Start practicing recording now – even if it is something made up – so you get a sense of how you sound and look when recorded. This feedback will help you become better. The sooner you start practicing, the better you will be when you want to record.

You can become the ideal person to present if you think you are not. You simply need to read up on the topic to be an expert and get some presentation practice in before you actually record. You can start both now.