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Lectures have been a mainstay in teaching for hundreds of years, as they can be used to convey information to many learners at once. In the past few decades, lecturers began adding multimedia presentations to supplement their delivery. In the online environment, lectures may be presented via written text, podcast, a slide presentation that may be narrated, or recorded lecture capture.

Why Use Lectures/Presentations?

Lectures and presentations typically provide students with essential information, helping them reach the initial levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (remember and understand) before moving on to higher levels such as analysis or evaluation. Lectures also fulfill the following purposes:

• Highlight or summarize specific points not readily available via external resources or presented elsewhere at a level that is either too advanced or too detailed for the intended purpose

• Orient students to a topic, concept, or activity

• Increase the instructor’s social presence when introducing a topic, delivering feedback, or demonstrating a task or skill

Best Ways to Use Lectures/Presentations?

Like reading activities, lectures and presentations are by nature a one-way endeavor. Because student-to-content interaction needs to be balanced with student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction, online instructors would do well to introduce specific ideas to help students engage with the presentation of information.

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The table appears with the permission of Margaret Martyn; Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.

Planning for Lectures/Presentations

Time is magnified in an online course, so for the benefit of your students—especially adult learners who have work, soccer practice for the kids, groceries, and other Life Matters on their plates—you will want to ensure that every bit of lecture content is intentional and meaningful. Of course, you have far more knowledge and understanding of the subject than most of your students will, but you will really need to separate the must-know from the good-to-know and save the latter for other learning activities that follow the presentation. Your students will be more likely to retain the essential information and be better able to pursue the auxiliary information outside of the lecture if they have experienced active participation in the lecture content.

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PLEASE GO: In the following YouTube video, Oscar Retterer of Franklin and Marshall College discusses four stages for creating effective multimedia presentations: plan, produce, practice, and present: Principles of Effective Presentations (9:06 min.)

Designing for Lectures/Presentations

In his book Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina suggests the following lecture design (in the book, the design was written for face-to-face classrooms, but the ideas can apply to the online environment):

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• Brain Rules for Presenters

  - A slide presentation by Garr Reynolds that summarizes takeaways from John Medina’s book Brain Rules. Hint: The focus is on visual presentation, so the 130-some slides will go fast.

• E-Learning: How to Deliver an Engaging Virtual Classroom Presentation

  (10:01 mins.) - A video posted to YouTube that shares excellent tips for presenting a live lecture using web conferencing software; the video was created by Facilitador.com, a business consultancy, but its ideas can very much apply to academic lectures.

• Top Ten Slide Tips

  - Helpful ideas for creating effective slide presentations, by Garr Reynolds of Kansai Gaidai University.

• Fifty Alternatives to Lecture

  - Despite the title, this is a good resource for ideas on how to engage students with regard to your presentation, by A.M. Pickett.

• Don’t Dump the Didactic Lecture; Fix It

  - An article by Daniel Richards of the University of Kentucky on why and how to increase student engagement with lecture material.

References

• Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association of Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3-7. Retrieved from  http://teaching.uncc.edu/articles-books/best-practice-articles/instructional-methods/7-principles

• Chua, S. (2009). Remote presentations that rock. [Slide presentation] Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/sachac/7-tips-for-remote-presentations-that-rock

• FacilitadorTube (Producer). (2010, February 2). E-Learning: How to Deliver an Engaging Virtual Classroom Presentation. [Video] Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxY22IhbaH4

• Lambert, C. (2012, March-April). Twilight of the lecture. Harvard Magazine, March-April 2012, 23-27. Retrieved from  http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture

• Martyn, M. (2009). Engaging lecture capture...Lights, Camera...Interaction! Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/engaging-lecture-capture-lights-camera-interaction

• Medina, J. (2013). Attention. Retrieved from http://www.brainrules.net/attention/?scene=1

• Medina, J. (2009). Brain Rules. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.

• Nielsen, C. (2008). Building better PowerPoint presentations. Retrieved from http://www.nnu.edu/fileadmin/Elearning/ELS/BestPractices_PPT.pdf

• Pickett, A. M. (n.d.). Fifty alternatives to lecture. Retrieved from https://edocs.uis.edu/boakl1/www/FiftyAlternativesToLecture.html

• Retterer, O. (Producer). (2009, November 19). Principles of Effective Presentations.  [Video] Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxR8lh9riFg

• Reynolds, G. (2008). Brain rules for presenters. [Slide presentation] Retrieved from  http://www.slideshare.net/garr/brain-rules-for-presenters

• Reynolds, G. (2005). Top ten slide tips. Retrieved from http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html

• Richardson, D. (2008). Don’t dump the didactic lecture: Fix it. Advances in Physiology Education, 32(1), 23-24.

Examples of Lectures/Presentations

Example 1

Lecture/Presentation from UF100 Intellectual Foundations Course at Boise State University

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Example 2

Lecture/Presentation from Engineering 100 Course at Boise State University

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