Enhancing public speaking skills - an evaluation of the Presentation Trainer in the wild

Full paper presented at EC-TEL 2016

The increasing accessibility of sensors allows the study and devel- opment of multimodal learning tools that create opportunities for learners to practice while receiving feedback. One of the potential learning scenarios ad- dressed by these learning applications is the development of public speaking skills. First applications and studies showed promising empirical results in la- boratory conditions. In this article we present a study where we explored the use of a multimodal learning application called the Presentation Trainer, sup- porting learners with a real public speaking task in the classroom. The results of this study help to understand the challenges and implications of testing such a system in a real-world learning setting, and show the actual impact compared to the use in laboratory conditions.

The underlying research project is partly funded by the METALOGUE project. METALOGUE is a Seventh Framework Programme collaborative project funded by the European Commission, grant agreement number: 611073 (http://www.metalogue.eu).