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).