The Master's Thesis: An Opportunity for Fostering Presentation Skills

Abstract

Presentation skills, such as oral expression and public speaking, have normally been relegated to the background in engineering degree programs. In recent years, however, the labor market has specifically demanded these kinds of skills in engineers. Accordingly, new engineering degrees, adapted to the goals of the Bologna Declaration or ABET criteria, consider presentation skills as being fundamental transferable skills. In practice, however, many engineering degree programs do not specifically foster these skills even though they are included in the syllabus. This paper proposes a presentation-skills training that uses the Master's thesis as an opportunity for fostering presentation-related skills. This activity has students deliver a scheduled series of rehearsals, in front of their classmates and tutors, for their officially assessed presentation of their Master's thesis work. The paper also presents a Web tool specifically designed for uploading recordings of the rehearsal presentations for feedback online as a complementary method for fostering presentation-related skills. Finally, the results of carrying out the proposed resource over a 4-year period from 2009 to 2013 are discussed; they show that students following the proposed methodology had higher than average marks, all receiving an A+, and 82% of them receiving an A+ with distinction.