Hi Lional. An excelent question.

As a former drama teacher, I make public speaking a part of what I feed into my teaching, especially as we use presentation as an assessment tool in the academy. However, I find that this element of teaching and learning mostly appears to get only cusory treatment. My guess is, many academics like to focus more upon 'the meat' and forget that presenting is actually a skill that can be learned. Add to this the fact that most people do not have a formalised process on how to teach something as 'profane' as public speaking. In my experience, this is one of the most important features helping students to achieve better grades, and perhaps the most important transferrable life-long skill. Yet, time and time again I see this being obviated by lecturers.

I have developed my own internal guidelines on how to do this, and you make a good point. I should write them up one day. I did write a whole liberal studies 'public speaking' course for a college about ten years ago.... wonder if they still use it - LOL! In short though, the following is a start:

Your body and face talk more than your mouth.

People listen to presenters who are confident and intruiging: body language and mimicry is generally what facilitates this.

Warm up your mouth tounge and lips with tongue twisters: your mouth is as much a muscle as anything else, and needs proper preparation.

Stand straight, do not fidget.

Make eye contact around the room.

Do NOT read off the presentation, and try to speak freely, perhaps with some notes in your hand.

Time your presentation.

Rehearse it, rehearse it, rehearse it.

Get feedback from your friends before the final presenation.

There is loads more, but I hope this might be helpful.

Best of luck,

Alex

As far as I remember from the course mainly concentrating on communication skill development while I was an undergraduate student, we were instructed on the fundamentals of how to speak well for a couple of weeks. After that, given the allocated time for getting prepared, first we chose one topic to make public speaking individually. The presentations were carried out via Powerpoint based on the principles of public speaking, which are very similar to the ones mentioned by @Alexander Gardner-McTaggart. Weekly presentations were assessed by the lecturer, in the meantime we observed each presenter receiving feedback from the lecturer. The whole process took one term. Generally speaking, still I see the positive impacts of my experiences during the course on my professional development. I hope you find this useful.

I agree that oral exams should be a requirement, in our university we promote the comprehensive training of the graduate and postgraduate and although it is no less true that these skills have much to do with personological characteristics is something that is learned with practice. During my studies I had a lot of course work to expose in front of the courts which reinforced my security when speaking publicly and exposing results.