Assignment 4: Assessment Presentation (Individual)

Overview

Assignment 4 builds on the work done during assignment 3 and involves delivering a short overview and orientation to the hypothetical user of the risk assessment methodology your team developed.  The purpose of this presentation is to convince decision-makers from your setting or sector to endorse the approach you are recommending. While the climate assessment assignment was a team assignment, this will be an individual assignment that builds on the team-based work to hone your skills in producing informed, insightful, and convincing presentations. You will develop a 15-minute presentation to a relevant decision-making body in your chosen region and audience that is based on the team climate assessment that you conducted.

Instructions

1. Choose a relevant decision-making body (e.g., city council, regional district board, engineering department, provincial ministry, provincial agency, transit authority, utility, non-profit organization board) in the region(s) your team assessment focused on.
2. Become familiar with how this decision-making body makes decisions so that you can design a presentation that is realistic, compelling, and likely to create change. This could involve higher level web research to get a sense of how they work (mandate, scope of actions) so that you can tailor your presentation in a way that makes sense to that organization.
3. Design a presentation that demonstrates your understanding of their sector or setting and that persuades them to adopt the assessment approach that your team developed. The presentation should take them through the main steps and decision-points of the assessment.
4. Optional: Record yourself delivering the presentation and submit as part of your grade for Assignment 5 (participation).

Requirements

A PowerPoint presentation (with speaking notes) that includes:

• Clearly defined target audience or decision makers, use the speaking notes to communicate what you have learned about your audience, including a description of their mandate and/or decision-making approach
• Overview of your assessment methodology
• Recommended next steps that the organization take

PowerPoint presentation should be up to 10 slides in length and should follow good practice for PowerPoint presentation (don’t make the slides too wordy–feel free to add notes to yourself or to Craig in the speaking notes of the presentation).

The assignment must be submitted on or before the due date.

Assessment Criteria

Some of the criteria that will be used to assess this assignment are:

• Content of presentation, including a sufficient level of detail in the speaking notes
• Definition of target audience
• Design of presentation
• Suitable length of presentation
• Degree to which the presentation is likely to be persuasive

The learning objectives that correspond to this assignment are:

• Evaluate core concepts of climate adaptation and resilience with a critical lens to solve problems and make climate action recommendations (learning outcome 1.1)
• Use evidence-informed climate adaptation strategies to develop or select feasible solutions, recommendations, and action plans (learning outcome 1.2)
• Communicate effectively using coherent, synthesized, well organized, edited, logical, and fully supported work (learning outcome 2.2)
• Demonstrate competence in translating and mobilizing climate adaptation knowledge for use by multiple stakeholder groups (learning outcome 5.2)

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Relevant Resource: RRU Library Guide: Presentation Tools

Weight: 15%

Optional Video Submission: A link to your video to Assignment 4 Moodle drop box. Refer to the technical tips below for submitting your video using the Moodle My Media feature.

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