Oral Presentation: Communicating Complex Academic Topics

School of Pathways and Immersion

About this example

Prepare and deliver a 5-7 minute oral presentation on a complex academic topic of your choice. Highlight key points, provide supporting details, and conclude appropriately. Use Microsoft Co-Pilot to assist in brainstorming and refining your content, and document your evaluation of the AI tool’s contributions.

The topic should be a complex academic topic selected by the student and approved by the teacher (e.g., sustainability, global health, media influence, AI in society, economic inequality, scientific innovation).

Learning outcomes:

Understand and apply fundamental written and oral communication skills at an introductory level
Demonstrate effective writing and speaking processes through invention, organisation, drafting, revision, editing, and presentation

This assessment was designed to help students build confidence communicating complex ideas in academic English. Many learners can understand content but struggle to explain it clearly, structure arguments, and speak with ease. By integrating Co-Pilot as a brainstorming support (instead of providing full scripts), we wanted students to see how AI can help generate ideas while they remain responsible for refining the language, adapting it for clarity, and making it their own. The oral format also encourages students to practise fluency, audience awareness, and real-time communication strategies.
- Students will gain greater confidence in structuring academic talks and recognising when AI-generated language requires clarification or simplification.
- Presentations will show clearer organisation, improved appropriate academic phrasing, and fluency as students refine their delivery skills.
- Students may develop stronger critical awareness of AI outputs by evaluating language register, accuracy, and suitability for their proficiency level.
- Students may develop stronger critical digital literacy and increased confidence in analysing cultural issues beyond personal opinion.
- Presentations could demonstrate clearer application of cultural theory to contemporary digital phenomena, while written summaries may show improved synthesis of ideas across multiple sources.
- Students may become more discerning in their use of AI tools - questioning accuracy, comparing perspectives, and making more intentional decisions about when and how to rely on AI during research.

Try it out

This design requires a medium level of effort to implement.

1. Educators in language-rich or communication-focused units can adapt this task to scaffold students’ academic speaking skills while modelling thoughtful AI use.
2. The core design can be used for presentations, pitches, tutorials, or even lab briefings. Adjusting the complexity of the topic or the length of the presentation allows easy scaling for different proficiency levels and class sizes.
- Students learning in a second language may not recognise when AI-generated text requires revision, and general instructions to “evaluate critically” often lack practical clarity.
- Brief in-class modelling demonstrates how to identify unclear phrasing, complex sentences, or inaccuracies.
- This makes the evaluation process visible and shows AI as a starting point, not a finished product.
- Students gain strategies to adapt language to their proficiency level.
Verbal explanation
- Students verbally explain how they refined the AI-generated ideas, justify content choices, and demonstrate how they adapted language and delivery strategies to communicate clearly in academic English.

Supporting resources

Here are some additional resources that you can browse to help you from TeachHQ:

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Class size: Any	Condition: Individual
Typology: Presentation	AI statement: Guided use
AI approach: Evaluating AI outputs	Visibility of Learning: Verbal explanation

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