Presenter best practice and pedagogy
The main thing to realise when delivering materials online is that you, the lecturer, will not be present. This may sound obvious, but it does have implications for methods of delivery – implications which people often forget when designing online resources.
Here are a few hints for producing an engaging set of online materials
Sound quality
- All too often online presentations are spoiled by poor audio quality. Student engagement and concentration is likely to decrease if they are faced with low vocal levels, high levels of hiss and other people talking in the background. Try to get the best sound quality possible, and always try record your presentations in a quiet room.
Use of text
- Some people include vast amounts of text in their presentations. Try to be sensible with the amount of text used.
- Try to prepare your Powerpoint presentation in such a way that text appears on screen as you speak it (this involves the use of animations in Powerpoint).
- Do not display some text (e.g. a long quote) and then talk about something completely different – this causes attention issues as students are not able to read one thing and listen to another.
- Should the presentation display every word textually? Can the main points be included as short bullet points while you talk around the points? This is a pedagogic issue for you to think about, and may depend on your target audience. For instance, with international students who use English as a second language, you should consider displaying pretty much every word so that they can hear and read it at the same time.
Visuals
- Because you are not physically present with your effervescent charms and charisma, try to think about ways to make the presentation more visually appealing – e.g. use of images, animations etc.
Length of presentation
- It is well reported that students lose concentration in a traditional lecture setting after as little as twenty minutes. With online delivery this may be an even greater issue. You may want to consider chopping your presentation up into smaller meaningful chunks – perhaps twenty minutes long.
Passive vs active learning
- as well as the more passive learning involved in lectures (or online lectures) you could include some active learning after each presentation, e.g.
- internet search tasks
- online quizzes
- interactive exercises
- reflective tasks – perhaps contribution to a blog or wiki in Blackboard
Page last updated 24 October 2012