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This article explores the options for incorporating lectures and presentations in online learning.

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.

For more than 25 years, educators have referenced a landmark article by Chickering and Gamson (1987) called the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. In the table below, Martyn (2012) uses the seven principles as a backdrop for suggestions to make lectures more engaging. The suggestions were written with face-to-face courses in mind, but most of the ideas can work online, as well.

For an accessible version of the table below, download Engaging Lecture Capture and the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.

Principle

Practice

Encourages contact between students and faculty

Include questions in lectures that students need to respond to. After reviewing the lecture, the student responds to questions on a discussion board. Students can respond to other students' responses as well. Grade discussion postings. Faculty can review and provide feedback. "Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of classes is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement."

Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students

Assign a student the responsibility of summarizing and highlighting the important points of the captured lecture. Students can be divided into groups to do this. The instructor then reviews and prompts students for missed points. In addition, student groups can take case studies presented in the lecture and do additional research and follow-up.

Encourages active learning

Require students to apply lecture material to a case study, problem set, or real-world application, instead of passively watching the lecture.

Gives prompt feedback

Incorporate a synchronous component in the lecture capture system. This provides online students the potential to get immediate feedback to questions. In addition, this option provides a larger pool of diverse students in the class discussion. Online students from a broader geographical area can provide a diverse perspective. Ask students to post the "muddiest point" of the lecture so that faculty can clarify via the discussion board. Create quizzes based on material presented in the lecture that are graded automatically. Having students see what they missed focuses learning.

Emphasizes time on task

Encourage students to review the lecture and learn before the next lecture is presented. This allows students to spend more time than would be available in a normal in-class session. "To improve learning outcomes, instructors must think creatively about using webcasting technology to free up valuable classroom time for more interactive discussion and activities."

Communicates high expectations

Provide feedback on assignments in the lecture to emphasize course goals and expectations. Students can review this feedback throughout the term via the lecture playback system.

Respects diverse talents and ways of learning

Support all learning styles: video and slides for visual, sound for auditory, and thumbnails and slide movements for kinesthetic learners. Different groups of students benefit from lecture capture in different ways. "The relationships between students' characteristics and the benefits they receive from webcasts are complex."

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.

So, while you plan the lecture, think about ways to get students engaged. Two of the most common tools educators use to call for reflections that may or may not be submitted for a grade:

  • One-minute paper - Ask students to write for one minute on a question, such as “What did you learn from this presentation?”

  • Muddiest point - Ask students to write a journal post (a blog that is open only between you and the individual) stating the most confusing point they are still mulling over from the lecture.

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):

  1. Break up lectures into 10 minute segments. The 10-minute rule states that attention span drops significantly after 10 minutes.

  2. Explain the "big picture" lecture plan at the beginning, "with liberal repetitions of 'where we are' sprinkled throughout the hour" (p.90).

  3. Cover only a single core concept in each 10-minute segment. Because the brain processes meaning before detail, use the first minute to explain the large, general picture and the following 9 minutes to provide the details.

  4. Provide "hooks" to keep your audience engaged through the next 10-minute segment. The most successful hook follows these three principles:

    1. Triggers an emotion. Examples: fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, a threatening event, and poignant narratives.

    2. Needs to be relevant to the content. Caution: Cracking a joke or giving an irrelevant anecdote can annoy or even anger your audience, so keep the hook relevant.

    3. Needs to go between segments.

      • At the end of a segment to look back or summarize or repeat some aspect of the material just covered.

      • Or at the beginning of the next segment to look forward, introduce new material, or anticipate some aspect of the content to be covered.

Medina provides a couple of examples he has used as successful hooks in his classes/business presentations:

  • Case histories describing an unusual mental pathology when lecturing on psychiatric issues

  • Business-related anecdotes to illustrate how brain science relates to business

Designing and developing effective lectures and presentations is part art and part science. You may have a storehouse of slide presentations already created, but perhaps now is a good time to take a step back and make sure you are following best practices. We encourage you to consider Medina’s suggestions as an opportunity to reframe the presentations and to consult with your instructional designer for assistance with getting your presentations chunked into shorter segments.

OPTIONAL: Visit any of the following resources for ideas on how to create effective lectures and/or follow-up activities:

References

Examples of Lectures/Presentations

Example 1

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

Below is an example of a video lecture on John Stuart Mill's Inaugural Address at St. Andrews, created by Dr. Jennifer Black and Professor Stephanie Cox for students in UF100 The History & Future of Higher Education. This video was created as a dialogue between the professors to keep the students interested and engaged and is presented as a form of conversation.

Mill's Inaugural Address at St. Andrews (23:03 min.)

Example 2

Lecture/Presentation from Engineering 100 Course at Boise State University

Below is an example of a video lecture with hand-written notes on metric notations in Engineering. (0:59 min.)

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