Lecturers often use a multimedia presentation to support their lesson. A range of software is available for this purpose, including Microsoft PowerPoint, Prezi, and Apple Keynote. The main aim of any teaching activity remains, of course, to achieve the learning goals and learning outcomes. So how do you ensure that a presentation contributes to this as much as possible? In this tip, we first look at what the purpose of a presentation is (and what it is not), and then provide some tips to make a presentation as effective as possible.
Purpose of a presentation
A multimedia presentation is a support to your lesson and not an end in itself. Of course, the basis of a lesson always remains the lecturer's lesson design in which the mix of tasks ensures the learning objectives are achieved. A presentation can contribute to this in a number of ways:
- Displaying lesson structure, ensuring the bigger picture is not lost on students;
- Highlighting core ideas;
- Providing materials (images, graphics, quotes, assignment instructions, etc) for the different exercises.
Downsides
However, presentations often turn out to play a much more central role than that of support, mainly due to the overload of information they contain. This creates a danger on both the students' and the lecturer's side. Students are indeed highly likely to spend more time reading and possibly transcribing the slides than actively participating in the lesson. From the lecturer's point of view, while a detailed presentation can give a sense of direction, in practice it often leads to reading the slides quite literally. This means the presentation actually takes over the lesson instead of aiding the lecturer's input.
Tips for an effective presentation
Progressive structure
It’s best to build a presentation step by step. This applies both at the macro level (the whole presentation) and at the micro level (slide).
At the macro level, a presentation is a good way to support the structure of your lesson. You can achieve this by incorporating a summary slide at regular intervals. Instead of showing the detailed breakdown of your lesson just at the start, you can build up this overview slide each time during your presentation (similar to the way structure used to be built up on a whiteboard).
Of course, it’s also perfectly possible to combine the two, giving a general overview at the beginning of your lesson and reconstructing it step by step during the lesson.
You can also use this method just as well with an individual slide. Instead of showing all the information at once, make it visible step by step. This will make your presentation more consistent with what’s being covered at that point in your lesson.
Clarity
Some practical aspects can ensure that your slides are clear and easy to read. The basic principle here is that your students should quickly get the message of the text on your slides, which assumes you use letterforms that are instantly recognisable (Alley, 2004; Alley, 2013):
- Use a sans serif font (i.e. without thin bars at the end of your letters);
- Don’t place words or sections of text entirely in capital letters (besides limiting recognition, capital letters are seen as shouting in web etiquette);
- Limit the use of italics as much as possible;
- Emphasise important elements by putting them in bold or varying colour or font size, not by underlining (in addition to a much busier word image, underlined text is often seen as a hyperlink);
- In a list, use numbering if the items have a logical sequence, otherwise use a bullet point;
- Provide a clear colour contrast between background and text (light background with dark text or dark background with light text) (Rost, 2016);
- Make your text large enough (minimum font size 28 for plain text, titles even larger).
Simplicity and consistency
The purpose of a presentation is to support your lesson, so it should not be the only focus of the students' attention.
- Don't turn your presentation into a firework show by applying as many different slide transitions, colours or animations as possible. Always use the same simple slide transition, make sure you use colours consistently and only insert animations when they add value.
- Don't overload a slide with too much information, especially when listing. This is often referred to as the 1-6-6 rule: 1 key topic per slide with a maximum of 6 lines and a maximum of 6 words per line. Although no scientific research has yet been conducted on this, the empirical sense does seem to be supported by findings from psychological research on the number of chunks of information the human brain can process at the same time (Miller, 1956; Cowan, 2001).
- Clarity is also an important aspect with graphs and tables. A table containing 20 different demographics of all members of the UN may be very comprehensive, but the overload of information will result in your table not actually being useful. You can solve this by selecting information (e.g. showing some countries as examples) or clustering (e.g. clustering countries by continent). You can then give students all the data via another means, on an electronic learning platform or in the coursebook for example).
- Images are a great asset in your presentation. Their purpose can be either substantive (e.g. a picture you use as a basis for a discussion) or structural (e.g. a cartoon that provides a moment of light relief as a chance to rest in your lesson) and they help make the presentation look more appealing to students and thus increase their interest (Clark, 2008). What matters is that you choose the images carefully so that they are functional and help in achieving your course objectives.
- Longer fragments of text are not ideal for projecting in a presentation. If you do, it's best to make it easier to read by already putting key words in bold. A longer text fragment to discuss during your lesson is best split over several slides.
Handouts
Usually, the presentation is delivered to students as a handout via the electronic learning platform. However, the question is when to make it available: before or after class? Students themselves like to have these in advance so that they can add notes during class. For the lecturer, however, students having all the content available beforehand isn’t always the best scenario. For example, the teaching-learning conversation is less likely, since students can already see the correct answers to questions in the handout.
One solution to this is to make a condensed version of the presentation available beforehand, which gives students just an overview of the lesson structure, without details. After the lesson, you can then make the full presentation available, if necessary omitting slides that don’t give additional information but were only useful during the lesson.
Want to know more?
Alley, M.& Robertshaw, H. (2004), Rethinking the design of presentation slides: creating slides that are readily comprehended, paper presented at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress, Anaheim, California.
Alley, M. (2013), The Craft of Scientific Presentations: Critical Steps to Succeed and Critical Errors to Avoid (2nd ed.), New York: Springer-Verlag.
Apperson, J.M., Laws, E.L. and Scepansky, J.A. (2006). The impact of presentation graphics on students' experience in the classroom. Computers & Education, 47: 116–126
Clark, J. (2008), PowerPoint and Pedagogy: Maintaining Student Interest in University Lectures. College Teaching, 56 (1), 39-45.
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. 2011. E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.
Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 24. 1 87-114; discussion 114-85.
Strauss, J., Corrigan,H., Hofacker, C.F.. (2011) Optimizing Student Learning: Examining the Use of Presentation Slides. Marketing Education Review 21:2, pages 151-162.
Levasseur, D. G. & Kanan Sawyer, J. (2006). Pedagogy meets PowerPoint: A research review of the effects of computer-generated slides in the classroom. The Review of Communication, 6(1-2), 101-123.
Miller, G. A. 1956 The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review. 63. 2 81–97
Rost, L.C. (2016), Your Friendly Guide to Colors in Data Visualisation
Yilmazel-Sahin, Y. (2009) A comparison of graduate and undergraduate teacher education students' perceptions of their instructors' use of Microsoft PowerPoint. Technology, Pedagogy and Education 18:3, pages 361-380.
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