Teaching oral communication at MIT: The concept module

In this paper, we introduce a teaching module used in an oral communications course at MIT to teach students how to (1) present technical material to a non-technical audience and (2) recover from things that may go wrong during a presentation. This module consists of various classroom activities that are all centered around an assignment in which students prepare a talk in order to explain a technical topic of their choosing to a non-technical audience. The entire experience culminates in a one-day conference attended by local high school students who serve as a live non-technical target audience for these talks. Here, we describe and discuss the various components of the module, with the hope that fellow practitioners will adopt and adapt the module for use in their home institution, and suggest modifications and improvements.