Presenter Services Home

Proposal Guides

Our Proposal Guides offer a reference on ways to enhance your OLC conference proposal and serve as a quick refresher on the best “advice” or “tips” our mentors have to offer.

Presentation Guides

Our Presenter Guides offer a reference on ways to enhance your OLC conference presentation and serve as a quick refresher on the best “advice” or “tips” our mentors have to offer.

Conference Resources

OLC Presenter Services is dedicated to enhancing the experience for all conference attendees by offering specialized guidance to presenters. Our curated list of resources – available to all OLC presenters – is developed with the goal of preparing each speaker to be able to present engaging content confidently to their audience. Conference-specific resources will be added as they become available.

SESSION TYPE GUIDES

Career Forum Roundtable – Innovate
Conversation, Not Presentation – Innovate
Discovery Session – Asynchronous – Accelerate, Innovate
Discovery Session – Onsite – Accelerate, Innovate
Education Session – Accelerate, Innovate
Gamified Session – Accelerate
Innovation Studio Design Thinking Challenge – Innovate
Workshop – Accelerate, Innovate

PRESENTATION RESOURCES

Presenter FAQ
Presenter Deadlines Calendar (OLC Innovate 2023)
Important Dates
OLC Innovate 2023 Session Evaluation Slide (view-only, download to use)
OLC Innovate 2023 Slide Template (view-only, download to use)

Guided Offerings

Mentoring

One of the best ways to improve upon a skill is to work with a mentor who can offer feedback and guidance that is tailored specifically to your needs. Connect with a mentor to explore strategies for engaging your audience, enhancing your slides, practice presenting, and more.

OLC offers this as a free service to all conference presenters. There are a limited number of mentoring sessions being offered for each conference. Mentoring requests will be accommodated on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Request Mentoring Services

Webinars & Design Sessions

These virtual sessions provide you with detailed guidance on strategies and techniques that can help you craft a successful presentation. By attending the live offering of the webinars, you will have the opportunity to ask questions of the presenters and share any insights or lessons learned from your own experiences.

We encourage all OLC conference presenters to attend these live webinars, as you will learn critical logistical information for both onsite and virtual presentations. If you are unable to participate in a live session, recordings will be available.

The OLC Innovate 2023 webinar schedule will be posted below in early 2023. Please use the links when provided to register to attend each individual session. In the meantime, feel free to review the recordings from OLC Accelerate as many of the tips, techniques, design, and engagement recommendations are consistent across OLC conferences and events.

The ‘Need-to-Knows’: OLC Innovate Presenter Logistics

Tuesday, February 28, 2023
1pm-3pm ET/10am-12pm PT

Watch Recording | Access Slides

Whether this is your first time presenting at an OLC conference or your 20th time, we anticipate that you may have questions surrounding some of the finer details. In this series of back-to-back Presenter Services logistics sessions, we will go over everything from how to find or access your session, how to encourage attendees to submit evaluations of your presentation, how (and why) to upload your presentation files and handouts, to what technology and equipment you will need. If you are presenting multiple sessions, we recommend that you attend each applicable time slot to learn about specific logistical details. These will be run as a series of back-to-back sessions (each consisting of 30 mins) covering the following presentation categories:

1:00-1:30pm ET/10:00-10:30am PT – Virtual Sessions
1:30-2:00pm ET/10:30-11:00am PT – Asynchronous Discovery Sessions
2:00-2:30pm ET/11:00am-11:30am PT – Onsite Discovery Sessions
2:30-3:00pm ET/11:30am-12:00pm PT – Onsite Sessions

Designing Your Presentation – Content and Engagement Strategies for Success

Wednesday, March 8, 2023
1-2:30pm ET/10-11:30am PT

Watch Recording | Access Slides

OLC Presenter Services Design Challenges provide opportunities for our Presenter Community to gather for active and collaborative session planning. Crowdsource ideas, learn essential strategies, and work directly with OLC Staff and mentors to prepare your presentation in this collaborative design session. In the first 45-minutes we will discuss how to focus and align your content. The second 45-minutes will focus on leveraging effective engagement practices.

On-demand Content

Tips and Techniques from Practiced Presenters

Access on-Demand Asynchronous Video Library

While most of us are comfortable teaching or working within online environments, presenting online remains a practice that requires a unique skillset. In this series of Presenter Services videos, experienced presenters from the OLC community lead a series of short lightning talks focused on key strategies and skills they’ve observed and utilized themselves for supporting quality presentations.

The Experts

About OLC Presenter Services

Did you know that public speaking consistently ranks as one of the top fear-inducing activities people can experience? With OLC’s Presenter Services, you will be able to speak confidently to your audience and deliver an engaging presentation. There are a variety of resources available to meet your needs regardless of experience or skills level. Being able to speak confidently in front of an audience will not only enhance your presentation experience, it can help you grow your career.

OLC Presenter Services is a year-round service which provides resources, trainings, and a robust network around effective presentation and facilitation strategies. There are several opportunities for volunteership through OLC Presenter Services, including working on a series of special projects.

Apply to Volunteer

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Mentor

Mentors offer feedback and guidance that is tailored specifically to community needs. Mentors work with presenters to explore strategies for engaging various audiences, enhancing slides, practice presenting, and more.

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Video Library Content Creator

Content Creators develop short (5-10 minute) video-based trainings for the OLC Presenter Services Video Library. Submissions range in topics and align with the creator’s areas of expertise.

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Video Library Content Reviewer

Content Reviewers serve as evaluators for content submitted to the OLC Presenter Services Video Library. They help ensure that all submitted content is high-quality through our peer-review process.

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Content Ambassador

Content Ambassadors serve as “in the field” community members, attending our events, reviewing presentations, and most importantly, identifying potential content creators and reaching out to them about contributing to the OLC Presenter Services Video Content Library.

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Leadership Team Member

Members of the Leadership Team provide guidance and thought leadership into the strategic direction of OLC Presenter Services, including how to ensure that Presenter Services programming and services align with community needs and the demands of the field of online, blended, and digital learning.

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Special Project Volunteer

Our current special projects opportunity is Video Content Assessment Tool. This special project team will have the opportunity to co-construct the assessment tool that will be used to review and evaluate submissions to OLC Presenter Services Video Content Library.

About our Volunteers

Working with a mentor can be the difference between a good presentation and a great one. All of our mentors have a proven history of giving presentations that consistently earn high ratings for all of the main components of successful sessions – engagement, slide design, and delivery.

Julie Hernandez

Presenter Services Volunteer Chair

Senior Claim Validation Advisor, Western Governors University

Katie Fife Schuster

Presenter Services Co-Lead (OLC)

Director of Global Events, Online Learning Consortium

Madeline Shellgren

Presenter Services Co-Lead (OLC)

Director of Community Strategy and Engagement, Online Learning Consortium

As the Director of Community Strategy and Engagement, Madeline (Maddie) Shellgren serves as the lead innovator, designer, and project manager of the OLC’s portfolio of online engagement opportunities. Known for her love of storytelling, play, and all things gameful, Maddie thrives on facilitating and designing meaningful ways for people to connect, learn, and grow together. Within the OLC, she has served on steering and operations committees for several of the organization’s conferences (including as Technology Test Kitchen and Innovation Studio lead, as well as Engagement Co-Chair) and has had the distinct honor of being the mastermind behind the OLC Escape Rooms. She looks forward to continuing supporting OLC community building efforts, is committed to sustainable, equitable, and anti-oppressive ecologies within education, and is genuinely excited to leverage her interdisciplinary scholarly and professional backgrounds as she helps lead the OLC towards truly innovative and transformative models for what’s possible for online and digital engagement. Maddie joins the OLC from Michigan State University (MSU), where she has served as the lead on numerous student success initiatives related to instructional design and technology, accessibility, and equity and inclusion. Over the past eleven years, Maddie has dedicated her professional life to teaching and learning related initiatives and has strategically sought out opportunities that give her a multi-dimensional perspective on teaching and learning, including working as a Standardized Patient training medical students, serving as Program Director for Teaching Assistant development, taking lead on a number of cross-institutional educator onboarding and professional development projects, and teaching across online and face-to-face contexts. She most recently worked as an Assistant Rowing Coach for the MSU Varsity Women’s Rowing Program. There she was given the opportunity to help redesign a community from the bottom up, story the team’s new journey together in fun and multimodal ways, lead in the co-construction of community expectations and norms, help ensure alignment across a variety of stakeholders and initiatives, and develop and operationalize strategic structures for long-term sustainability (such as entirely new social media, marketing, communications, and content management strategies). She had the privilege of seeing the impact of her human-centered and equity-oriented approach each and every day as the team reimagined what it meant to be a Spartan on the MSU Rowing Team. With her move to the OLC, she will continue on as a volunteer coach, still supporting these efforts and the team, and is excited to get back on the water.