New Pub: From Nervous to Noteworthy: Evaluating SPEAKS

New Pub: From Nervous to Noteworthy: Evaluating SPEAKS

Competence development, Conference, Conference, Higher Education
Public speaking can be nerve-wracking, but it’s also a skill every professional needs. Many students leave higher education feeling unprepared to speak confidently in front of an audience. Traditional courses exist, but providing enough guidance to every student is time- and resource-intensive. This is where SPEAKS comes in. SPEAKS (Speech content Preparation for Effective and Authentic Knowledge Sharing) is an educational software designed to guide students through preparing the content of their speeches. The tool and its evaluation were presented at ECEL 2025 in a paper authored by Nina Mouhammad, Jan Schneider, Roland Klemke and Daniele Di Mitri as part of the HyTea-project, highlighting its potential to support students in developing better speech content and becoming more confident regarding public speaking. The tool uses a fully scripted, chat-based interface with…
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HyTea Consortium Meeting in Cologne

HyTea Consortium Meeting in Cologne

Artificial Intelligence, Competence development, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Multimodal Learning Analytics, Project, Project meeting
How can software support presentation skills training? How can AI be used responsibly in this context? What to take from traditional presentation skills training and what to do completely different? In the HyTea consortium meeting, we discussed these questions but also many others and took important decisions on what to focus on in the HyTea project. We started preparing the needed knowledge needed for these critical decisions a few months ago when conducting interviews with presentation training experts. We asked them how they train presentation skills, how students should prepare a presentation and how they think AI or technology in general could support in presentation skills training. Furthermore, we also discussed concerns the experts had regarding AI usage in this context. In preparation of the consortium meeting, we synthesized all…
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Nina Mouhammad @ ECTEL 2023 Doctoral Consortium

Nina Mouhammad @ ECTEL 2023 Doctoral Consortium

Competence development, Conference, Higher Education
How often in the last few months did you listen to amazing presentations? And how often did you sit through rather boring ones? We have all been there, and it is probably safe to say that we would prefer more of the former and fewer of the latter. The good news is, presentation skills are not traits but skills and can therefore be trained. The challenge, however, is that training these skills requires quite some time and resources, which are often scarce in traditional educational settings. Technology-enhanced learning could fill this gap. And that is where Nina Mouhammad's PhD research, as part of the HyTea-project, is planned to contribute to. In her PhD, she will explore how technology can teach students to create presentation content that makes their presentations truly…
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Workshop @ JTELSS – “We can’t stop communicating – AI can help us to use this data for education”

Workshop @ JTELSS – “We can’t stop communicating – AI can help us to use this data for education”

Summer School, Workshop
At the 17th EATEL Summer School on Technology-Enhanced Learning (JTELSS 2023) in La Manga, Spain, Nina Mouhammad and Stefan Hummel conducted the workshop "We can't stop communicating - AI can help us to use this data for education." The workshop emphasized the importance of incorporating both verbal and nonverbal communication signals in technology-enhanced learning applications. Various examples highlighting successful implementations were discussed. The participants were divided into two groups to explore nonverbal and verbal communication, respectively. After engaging discussions, interactions and also prototype testing, the groups swapped to gain insights from both perspectives. To conclude the workshop on a creative note, participants formed small groups and designed either the worst presentation skills training app imaginable or a product box for a presentation skills training robot. This exercise sparked laughter while…
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