Instructions for Presenters

This page provides a brief overview of the steps and processes that you can follow to create your presentations for ProComm 2020. If you want a printable version, click this link for a downloadable PDF version of these Instructions for Presenters.

This year’s conference will be held entirely online via the Engagez.net platform. Regular sessions and roundtables will be presented “SimuLive”—they will feature prerecorded video presentations with live question-and-answer sessions following. Panels will be presented either SimuLive or live via video conferencing. Workshops will be conducted according to the session leaders’ preferences and needs.

Constructing Your Presentation

  1. Prepare your audiovisual presentation as you normally would for presenting at an onsite conference, but consider including live images of yourself as part of the presentation. A talk that includes your face or cuts back and forth from your face will be more interesting than a plain slide presentation.
  2. Use your favorite screen-capture or video-recording software to create an MP4 file of your presentation, and save it to your computer.
  3. If you can, create captions to accompany the MP4 file. Captions are not mandatory, but they would be welcome.

If your employer provides you with captioning software or services, please consider using these resources.

If you have a .edu email account, you can create a free account at otter.ai and generate four free transcripts of your presentation. Export the transcripts in .srt (caption file) format and use it with your video-processing software to add captions that a user can turn on and off.

If you do not have access to captioning-ready software, consider purchasing a paid version of Screencast-O-Matic. This screen-capture software is relatively simple, and the price is reasonable, at $20/year.

If you create your presentation in PowerPoint, you can generate captions in real time as you record your video using screen-capture software, but these captions are embedded in the video image, and viewers cannot turn them off. Instructions for PPT captioning are posted on the MS Office support pages.

  1. Upload your MP4 file to the ProComm Google Drive by Monday, July 13.

Please keep your file size as small as possible in order to avoid problems in transferring files.

After you upload your MP4 file, the conference organizers will upload your video to Engagez.net.

The July 13 due date is fairly soon, but the conference team needs time to upload your files and test the system before it goes live.

Filenames

Please save your presentation file using this filename convention, including the spaces and punctuation:

Author(s), Last, Name(s) – PresentationType MeetingNumber – Abbreviated Title

for example…

Gibbons, Hill, Beard – Panel 9 – T&PC in La Grange, TX

Consult the ProComm 2020 conference schedule for your presentation type and meeting number.

Types of Presentations

Sessions 1-8: Authors of Brief and Full Papers will present in the traditional way, grouped by theme. Because sessions are 45 minutes long and usually include three presentations, authors should target their presentations for 10 minutes. The moderator will use the remaining time for Q&A with the audience.

Panels I–3: Authors of Panel sessions should coordinate their combined presentation to have a target length of 20–30 minutes. If the presentation will be SimuLive, the combined presentation can be a single large file or a collection of individual files, and the moderator will use the remaining time for Q&A with the audience. If the presentation will be live, the moderator will use the chat function to field questions from the audience.

Roundtables 1–4: Authors of Extended Abstracts should each create a brief overview presentation of their work, with a target length of 5 minutes. Within each named session, the audience will split into two or three breakout rooms for a brief presentation and Q&A session. After time is up, the audience will automatically rotate (the authors stay put) to another breakout room.

Workshops 1–3: Workshops are scheduled for an extra-long 105 minutes. Workshop facilitators can decide how to best use the time, with any combination of recorded material, screen-sharing, conference-call type discussion, breakout rooms, etc. The conference team will work to connect facilitators with the names and email addresses of attendees who signal their interest in a workshop before the conference.