Karen Donohue teaches Supply Chain Operations OMS 6056 to both part time and full time MBA students. Her students had been required to create 20 minute group presentations on topics pertinent to the Supply Chain Industry. While Professor Donohue was able to comprehensively evaluate the content of the presentations, she felt that the students would benefit from an evaluation of their public speaking and presentation skills.

Enter Sheryl Holt, a communications consultant affiliated with the Leadership Edge program for MBA students. Leadership Edge is a program for daytime MBA students that focuses on helping students learn about leadership, their leadership capabilities, and strategies for strengthening them. The program offers services to faculty and students to enhance learning and student professional development. Professor Donohue had met with LaBarre Spence, the director of the Leadership Edge Program, and through thoughtful discussion, he had recommended Ms. Holt to Professor Donohue. Ms. Holt has extensive experience teaching and evaluating presentation skills to MBA students.



Professor Donohue first piloted this project as an opportunity for evaluation in a real time environment that brings together business and soft skills for her day time MBA students in OMS 6056 last year. As the project received excellent feedback from the students, Professor Donohue decided to expand the evaluation to the part-time MBA students as well in Spring 2005. Citing this as a simple and low key opportunity for deeper learning, Professor Donohue gave the students their group assignments with approximately 4-5 students in a group. Students choose their presentation topics from a set list of topics that built on the course content. The students were informed from the beginning that they would receive detailed feedback on both the content and delivery of their group presentation. To help students develop their presentation skills in preparation for the assignment, Professor Donohue invited Ms. Holt to visit the class about two weeks into the semester to give a short 20 minute lecture. With a strong team orientation, Ms. Holt emphasized creation of a storyline, continuity of the storyline, and consistency throughout a presentation.

After the students had put in significant time on the projects, final presentations were made with both Ms. Holt and Professor Donohue evaluating. Ms. Holt was placed in the rear of the classroom and took notes and taped each presentation. Her evaluation on both team and individual levels were given to Professor Donohue, who then included the soft skills evaluation along with content evaluation and returned both to the students at the same time.

Student feedback was very positive. Although some full-time MBA students noted that they had a previous presentation assessment experience through the Leadership Edge program, they appreciated the opportunity to receive detailed feedback on their delivery skills a second time. Many of the part-time MBA student commented that this was the first time they have received delivery-specific feedback, and appreciated this new opportunity. The part-time MBA students do not currently go through the same Leadership Edge programming as full-time students.

For more information on Leadership Edge services, please contact LaBarre Spence via email at lspence@csom.umn.edu.

For more information on Office of Learning Excellence services, please contact Paul Wieser at pwieser@csom.umn.edu.