Lecture slides - keep them to yourself

Nearly every course I look at on our institution's VLE is full of copies of the Lecturer's PowerPoint slides, usually labelled as "Lecture Notes" or something similar. In many places it is an institutional requirement that lecture notes are posted on line a week in advance (to ensure full accessibility for students with dyslexia and similar conditions).  This is clearly a good idea but just posting your PowerPoint file is not the answer.  Here is why:

1. If your slides are all the student needs then why give the lecture?
If all the information the student needs can be simply read from the slides, then you may as well save yourself the trouble, post the slides and tell the students not to turn up for your lecture as you won't be there!

Of course this is not really an option, the point is that you need to put less on your slides and more detail into your spoken words so that you have a purpose on the day.  Of course your purpose isn't just purely to provide the detail, it is also to enthuse, persuade and motivate the students to engage with, understand and assimilate the material ... but that is a separate issue for other posts...

2. Students are not very good at reading Presentation Notes.
Even if you create your presentation correctly, with just one point per slide (with a pertinant visual) and your detail in the Notes section, students are notiously bad at looking at anything other than the slides themselves if you give them the .pptx file.  If they bother to print a copy, they will do it as handouts to save money so your notes will be missing anyway.

The answer is to create a completely different type of file to put up on your VLE or to give as a handout.  The best type is a completely separate document created in Word with all the important information in it.  However, most of us do not have the time to create the lecture twice and so I use the Publish option to create handouts in Word as an excellent alternative:

One page of the finished pdf file.

1. Once you have finished creating your slides (including writing the detail of your narration in the Notes section for each one), choose Publish from the Office menu (the one you get when you click on the circle in the top left of your screen) and then select Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word.
2. Make sure it is set to Notes next to slides and click OK.
3. Wait whilst Word opens and transfers all your slides and notes into a table.
4. Spend a while editing the table so that you can fit at least 5 slides on each page.  I usually do the following:
• Delete the first column (slide numbers are unimportant)
• Change the document margin settings to 'narrow')
• Increase the width of the Notes column
• Change all row heights to about 4.8 cm
• Make sure all text is 10 pt
• Various other small changes to my personal design (I add some borders, delete extra carriage returns, add paragraph spacing, align centre left etc)
5. Finally, save the file as a PDF. (The Word document it produces is about 10 times the filesize of the original PowerPoint file - just too big!)

You now have a relatively small file (between 1,500 and 4,000 KB) which you can upload to your VLE.  The students get the slide images and the detailed notes.  If you still find that they don't turn up (due to the excellent and comprehensive nature of your lecture notes) then you need to think of more ways to add value to their lecture experience (such as encouraging interaction etc - see my previous post).

Using Clickers with PowerPoint

Clickers (or Audience Response Systems) are now appearing in the HE institutions up and down the country.  With these systems, students each have a small clicker (like a mini TV remote) and you ask multiple choice questions during your lecture and students can vote using their clickers aka "Ask the Audience" in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".  Depending on the sort of question you ask this can either give them immediate feedback on their understanding of the topic or allow them to give a student perspective on a topic (possibly starting off further in-class discussion).

Where do you get the clickers?
Your institution may have purchased sets of clickers (which you may loan or may be loaned directly to the student from your library) or they may have decided to purchase licenses that enable students to respond to questions using their own smart phones or laptops.  If you want to buy sets of clickers then the most popular options come from a company called TurningTechnologies who have a website at http://www.turningtechnologies.co.uk

Where do you get the software?
The most commonly used software is Turning Technology's TurningPoint software which can be downloaded for free from  here http://www.turningtechnologies.com/responsesystemsupport/downloads . The reason this is the most popular choice is its seamless link with PowerPoint - when you open TurningPoint you are basically opening PowerPoint with an extra ribbon at the top.

The TurningPoint ribbon within PowerPoint

I am not going to use this blog to teach people how to use the software as there are online tutorials here: http://www.turningtechnologies.co.uk/support/tutorials .

Pedagogy of Clicker Use

It is more important to think of the pedagogy involved and I would recommend the work of Derek Bruff who wrote the excellent book Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments and has also written about them extensively on his Agile Learning website: http://derekbruff.org/?page_id=2 .

Some (probably most) people use the clickers anonymously, that is they just hand out the devices randomly and are not following the answers of a specific student.  Others assign specific clickers to specific students (using the code on the back) and so can track their individual responses and even use them for assessment.

Personally I have only used the random method and have found it invaluable to engage students and encourage participation.  The sort of questions I have found the most useful are ones that either create a 'time for telling' (i.e. most of them get it wrong so your following explanation is more interesting and relevant to them) or require the students to find the 'one-best-answer' (where all the answers are feasible but one is better than the others and so the students really have to think about it more deeply.

The other brilliant way of using them is to encourage interaction between the students.  This can be as simple as giving them 1 clicker between 2 or 3 students and asking them to come to an agreed answer  before voting.  The other is to use Peer Instruction methods.

Peer Instruction

Clickers are an important part of the peer instruction teaching method. (See Eric Mazur's book Peer Instruction: A users manual or his website http://mazur.harvard.edu/research/detailspage.php?rowid=8) .  The clickers are used twice for each question - first the students answer from their own knowledge, if between 35 and 70% get it right (only the tutor seeing the answers) then they must find someone who gave a different answer to themselves and try to persuade them of their reasoning.  At the end of the discussion time the question is asked again - typically at least 90% of the students will then get it right.

There are two reasons for this working, firstly the right answers are usually the easiest to defend as logic will out, secondly students who have only recently developed the understanding are better at persuading other students who do not understand than tutors for whom it all seems obvious!

The important part of making peer instruction work is coming up with the right questions in the first place (ones that test understanding not recall and which are difficult enough but not too difficult) and that the students are given reading to do before the lecture (so that more time can be spent developing their understanding and less on information transfer).  This is a variation of the  flipped classroom  model where information transfer is done at home and problems are completed in class (rather than the traditional way of transfer in class and problems as homework).

All these types of clicker use can work really well to encourage engagement during a lecture using PowerPoint.  The last time I used them I asked for some feedback from the students and got an overwhelmingly positive response:

 

 

Academic PowerPoint slides should be like PEE paragraphs

My 14 year old daughter is always having to use PEE paragraphs in her school essays.  It stands for Point, Evidence, Explanation.  In her English essays this usually amounts to making a point, giving quotes that are examples and then explaining her reasoning.


It struck me that the same principle works really well for academic PowerPoint slides (as well as a lot of other types of PowerPoint slides as well).  


The P (Point)
Make your point in the title of the slide.  It should be a full sentence that fully represents the point you are making.  You should only have ONE point per slide. There has been quite a bit of research on the use of full sentences as titles in educational presentations.  Michael Alley of Penn State University has written on the topic a lot.  Here is a link to his work http://writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html.  He calls the title the assertion, indicating that it is where you assert a fact, an opinion, a theory etc.  


Here is an example of a typical slide with a single word heading and a more effective one that makes the point more directly:

I know some information is missing - that is what the narration is for (see The second E below)

The first E (Evidence)

The evidence should be shown on the slide.  This could be in the form of a photograph, a drawing, a diagram, a chart, a table, or even (but VERY rarely) a short list of bullet points.
Given my last blog post I say this with trepidation so please always try to think of an alternative before you go down that route.  If you can use visual evidence more learners are engaged and the information is shared between the visual and textual processing areas in the brain (making it easier to take in).


The second E (Explanation)
The explanation should be in your verbal narration only.  DO NOT BE TEMPTED TO WRITE IT ON THE SLIDE.  I know I am shouting but this is really important.  Overloading the slide with too much written information will undo the good you are doing with your point and evidence.


So, here is a PowerPoint slide to sum it up:

Slides with bullet points are detrimental to learning

I've decided to write this blog because all the popular books and websites I see about the best use of presentation software are aimed at people in business or other non-educational areas.  When I try to persuade academics that many of the same rules apply within the lecture theatre as the board room or conference hall, I often get short shrift.  So I've decided to use this blog to show how the lessons of 'presentation gurus' like Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Cliff Atkinson and Olivia Mitchell can be adapted and applied to the sort of 'presentations' we create for academic lectures.


The first and most important thing to do is to GET RID OF BULLET POINTS.  Research (much by Richard E Mayer at UCSB) shows that students do not learn well when written text (such as bullet points on a slide) is presented simultaneously with the spoken word (as in the narration to a presentation).  Mayer's research actually showed that students learned better from narration alone than when it was coupled with the written word.  It is official - slides full of text (usually in the form of bullet points) are detrimental to learning!


This is obvious when you think about it, how many of us can listen to a play on the radio whilst reading a book?  Even if the book was about the play this is an impossible task; we mentally tune out what is being said whilst we read, if we find ourselves listening we have to re-read the same paragraph in the book.

Carousel projector from 1963 -
was it responsible for slides
full of bullet points?

Most lecturers are horrified at the idea of getting rid of bullet points.  They seem to think that it is like removing their right arm.  I would simply question why we feel the need to use them in the first place.  When did the bullet point arrive in academia?  I suspect it was when we started to be able to produce 35mm slides back in the 50s and 60s.  You know, the ones that went on a carousel and always got stuck at some time during the lecture. Originally these were just used for images but there came a time when we could add text to them (I remember blue backgrounds with yellow text a lot).  The problem was, they were quite expensive to get made, so people put as many points as they could onto one slide - and the 'bullet point slide' was born.  PowerPoint did a lot to perpetuate this, earlier versions had 'bulleted list' as the default slide layout.  Even now, the default layout when you click 'New Slide' after your title slide has your first bullet point waiting to be filled.....don't do it!!  


The main reason lecturers seem averse to getting rid of bullet points is they cannot think of another way of getting the material across.  Somehow they think that students will not listen to them unless a digest of what they are saying is written behind them.  Remember Mayer's research - students learn better with JUST narration than they do with text and narration together.  If you cannot think of suitable non-bullet point content for a slide remember that putting nothing is better than lots of text.


Others think they will simply not remember what they need to say and use the bullet points as an aide memoir.  This just leads to lecturers reading their slides which students say is by far the most annoying thing about PowerPoint and leads to BORING lectures.  We just have to do what we tell our students to do: prepare well.  For most experienced lecturers, a single sentence should be enough to prompt the recall necessary (which is on the slide as a title).  New lecturers should consider using simple cue cards or Presenter View (where the lecturer sees their speakers notes and the students see the slides).  Unfortunately some lecture theatres do not support this view, here at the University of Hull for instance we cannot use Presenter View as the feed to our screens comes straight from the lectern monitor not the PC.  In any case, we should release ourselves from behind the lectern whenever possible.


I saw a slide recently with these fantastic bullet points on it (there was no narrator!)

       

I don't know about you, but the idea of turning up for a lecture where I know the students will not be listening to a word I say is disheartening to say the least!


Getting back to Mayer's research, he found that if the spoken narration was coupled with meaningful illustrations instead of written text, understanding was increased.


So there it is, fill the body of the slide with a meaningful image (photograph, drawing, diagram, chart etc) and talk about it.  Job done - students learn better.

A slide from a Human Grown and Development module given here at the
University of Hull showing a relevant image as the main slide content

A slide from an Academic and Professional Skills module given here at the
University of Hull showing the main body of the slide filled with a chart