This was a webinar hosting by the Training Magazine Network. The topic was on how to keep your audience from becoming “dazed, confused and bored” in a training session. It offered 7 ways to accomplish this lofty goal.
The first 4 minutes were spent on explaining the features of the page. What does “Q&A” stand for. What does the little bird stand for (hint: twitter) and the background of the presenter. All done by the moderator in a monotone. I was getting a bit dazed 5 minutes into it.
Then came the presenter – a vice president of some virtual learning strategy firm. He started by showing 3 bullet points and reading off them. He did expand on them a bit. So it was not just a verbatim reading of the words. Then came the next slide with 4 bullet points and the same reading out loud of these bullet points that were clearly visible AND readable to his audience. I could not remember what he said about the first bullet point becasue I was already reading the 4th one. He stumbled a bit in reading his own slides and apologized for “not being to read too well” that day.
By this time, I was dazed and a bit confused.
Then at 9 minutes, he flashed a slide with ALL 7 of his magical ways to keep the audience from getting dazed, confused and bored – in 7 bullet points. He then droned on in his monotone about those 7 points which I could clearly read.
I was getting bored, a bit dazed and kind of confused at this point.
The presenter then flashed a slide with 12 bullet items on it and started to read them off one by one.
So I took a screen shot of the 7 bullet points and the 12 bullet points and left the webinar.
It is all there, so why waste 50 more minutes of my time?
Besides, I was dazed, confused and totally bored.
Excellence in Presentations 