Exploring presentation styles in higher education teaching and research situations: distance and face-to-face

Universities are increasingly using advanced video-conferencing environments to interact for teaching and research purposes at a distance and in situations that combine distant participants with those face-to-face. Those who use these technologies expect professional development support to do so but we do not yet have a comprehensive research platform on which to base this support. The research described here sought to explore research protocols that could enrich our understanding of this domain, based on exploratory quantitative analyses of presenters' behaviours and participants' perceptions of presentations. It identified a number of presenter-behaviours that may predict overall participant perceptions and that may discriminate between categories of perceived presentation quality. We conclude that this research approach may be capable of producing realistic guidelines for presenters who operate in distance settings but that these do need to address the particular circumstances in which presenters find themselves.