At the Blackboard World conference in July 2011, several of the e-Learning Center’s staff, along with other Northern Arizona University colleagues, gave poster sessions or presentations that were well received and generated a lot of interest among conference attendees. By request, we’re making the posters available in a downloadable size (17 x 11 inches, .pdf). Click on each small poster image below to see the larger .pdf version. The posters were created by the e-Learning Center’s Creative Design Group. PowerPoint slides (.pptx) are also available for one presentation.
Listening to Student Voices: Assessing and Responding to Students’ Experiences with Blackboard Learn
A poster session by Dr. Sue Pieper, Coordinator of Assessment,
and Don Carter, Director
Last year, as part of a pilot project in which Northern Arizona University investigated Blackboard Learn for possible adoption as the university’s learning management system, we surveyed our students, asking them about their experiences in using Blackboard Learn in the pilot courses. The results of that survey are summarized on the poster along with recommendations for Blackboard and for other institutions that are considering using Blackboard Learn.
The Pedagogical Opportunities of Mobile Technologies: iPads and Kindles in the Classroom
A poster session by Dr. John Doherty, Instructional Designer,
and Kevin Ketchner, Librarian, Cline Library
With mobile devices beginning to enter the classroom, students are only two finger-swipes away from the game Angry Birds Rio, or YouTube, or any number of other popular diversions. Ketchner and Doherty describe how to use mobile apps and tools in ways that engage students in class and encourage student interaction with peers, instructors, and content. They provide examples of appropriate and effective choices that can enhance learning.
(R)eflective Learning: The Experience of Journaling from Campus Edition to Bb Learn
A poster session by Dr. John Doherty, Instructional Designer,
and Kevin Ketchner, Librarian, Cline Library
This poster is organized around Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences (Jossey-Bass, 2003). Ketchner and Doherty deconstruct Fink’s model, presenting an application and example of how online journaling can enhance students’ critical
reflection, self-reflection, thinking, and metacognition. They contend that reflective learning through journaling leads to insight and significant learning experiences for students.
From Vista 8 to Blackboard Learn 9.1— Lessons
Learned and Tips for Success
A presentation by Dan Stoffel, Assistant Director,
and Erin Shelley, Blackboard Learn System Administrator
Northern Arizona University has just made the transition from Blackboard Vista 8 (formerly WebCT Vista) to Blackboard Learn 9.1. The process of moving to a new learning management system includes the migration of nearly 2000 courses from the old system to the new. This presentation describes NAU’s course migration process and suggests strategies for other institutions who are following a similar path.
Pedagogy and Online Learning: Training Users on Backward Design
A presentation by Dr. John Doherty, Instructional Designer,
and Wally Nolan, Instructional Designer
The design and development of online content is sometimes too focused on the learning management system rather than on students’ learning. The backward design approach, described well in Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (Pearson, 2006), helps instructors begin with the end—learning—in mind. This presentation described self-paced online tutorials that guide instructors and course creators to align their learning objectives, assessments, and learning activities independent of a learning management system.
Sigh. Where to begin? There are so many reasons why using PowerPoint for online courses is a Bad Idea. PowerPoint is just a tool, of course, but it’s so often the wrong tool for the job, especially in teaching online. A hammer is only a tool, but in the wrong hands, well, it makes a mess of things. So it is with PowerPoint.
It’s not that PowerPoint—henceforth referred to as PPT—can’t be used effectively for teaching online. It’s just that most people have developed deplorable PPT habits and now believe that textually dense PPT slides, cheesy animated transitions, and gaudy 3-D graphs are de rigueur for teaching in the classroom and therefore are the perfect choice for online courses, too. To that I say “Nuh-uh. Not. FAIL!” Who else says so? Well, these guys:
Don McMillan, Life After Death by PowerPoint
This video humorously highlights the problems of bad PPTs.
Guy Kawasaki, The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint
Although Kawasaki is targeting entrepreneurs rather than educators, his points still generally apply.
Information design guru Edward Tufte has long decried the evils of PowerPoint, even going so far as to suggest that “stupefying fragments” of reasoning split across multiple PPT slides might have contributed to a space shuttle disaster. The following image is from his commentary on the Columbia explosion. Click the image to see a larger version.
The gist of their criticism is that too many people use PPT poorly even in the situations for which it was designed, namely in-person presentations. The slides tend to serve as a crib sheet for the presenter rather than informing the audience. Now imagine those problems multiplied when a PPT presentation that was awful enough in person gets posted online without the benefit of an instructor to explain the lacunae. Online students assaulted by bad PPT can’t even pelt the instructor with tomatoes.
The Crux of the PPT Problem: Missing Information
A PPT slide, when used to good effect in the situations for which it was designed, contains a single important bit of information. The individual giving the presentation in person is expected to orally set the context, explain the rationale, fill in the details, identify nuances and counterpoints, extrapolate, and draw conclusions from the nugget on the slide. The problem with posting such slides online should be immediately obvious: without the presenter, the slide is next to useless because all of the supporting information is missing.
“Ah ha!” you say. “That must be an argument in favor of putting full paragraphs on slides.” Um, no. If you feel the need to write full paragraphs to explain whatever it is you’re teaching online, fine. But don’t put them on a PPT slide. Put them on a web page. Web pages are pretty good at handling lots of text, as well as audio, video, and other media. PPT isn’t.
Basically, a PPT presentation that was well constructed for an in-person presentation is inadequate for an online course. And a PPT presentation that sucked in person will suck worse online.
PowerPoint is supposed to play the role of the nerdy kid from the A/V department who keeps all your slides straight and makes you look good. But more often than not, I get the stack without the presenter, and no matter how smart or informed I am, any solo effort to expend that stack into an adequate proxy for a 10,000-word document is simply bound to come up short.
Mitchell describes a presentation given by Chris Atherton, a cognitive psychologist who delivered an 86-slide presentation (ack!) on how to design slides that work with the human brain instead of against it. Although I imagine the presentation was fascinating and informative if you were there to see it live, clicking through the slide deck leaves you feeling that something (clue: it’s a person) is missing. Dr. Atherton’s slides are adequate (if overly abundant) for in-person delivery. But posted online without the benefit of her descriptive explanation and insight, they are not entirely helpful and certainly aren’t substantive enough for a student to learn from and be tested on. BTW, if you’re sick of reading this blog post, see Dr. Atherton’s slides 51–54 to get the quick and dirty summary of the point. Slide 71 is also pithy.
Why Are Instructors So Eager, Nay Insistent, about Putting Their PPTs Online?
Instructors have a large library of PPTs they’ve built up over the years
So what? I have a large library of audio cassettes that I recorded years ago from my vinyl record albums and then lovingly hand-labeled with a calligraphy pen. They are stashed in a drawer, representing cherished memories, especially since I sold all the vinyl at a yard sale. But do I actually listen to them? Heck no! Like most people, I’ve upgraded to digital recordings from Amazon, iTunes, and Magnatune. I also listen to compilations on Pandora. The digital versions sound better, are more easily organized and searched, and they don’t degrade the more often I listen.
If your PPTs are more than two years old, you probably need to update them anyway so that the information reflects the current thinking and latest research in your academic discipline. And it wouldn’t hurt to root out those typos and embarrassing spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. While you’re at it, get rid of the illegible tiny type and the annoying SCRIPT IN ALL CAPS. Also ditch the ugly lavender-on-pea-green color scheme and the not-as-cute-as-you-think animated clip art.
Illegible
Ugly and Hard to Read
Not Cute
My point: musty old PPTs aren’t as valuable as you think. It’s time to move on. And since you’re gonna have to update your material anyway, you might as well do it in a new way.
Instructors already know how to use PPT and don’t want to learn a new tool or process
Instructors seem to forget that they weren’t born knowing how to use PPT. They had to learn to use it, and now it’s time to learn how to use something else. Some instructors think they’re too old, too tired, too busy, or too important to learn new stuff. Others are technophobic and afraid to ask for help, thinking it would signal weakness and vulnerability.
But if you don’t update your skills, you’ll fail to connect with your 21st-century students and will get lousy course evaluations. Online instruction and Web 2.0 tools differ from in-person instruction, and if you don’t learn the differences and adapt your teaching methods accordingly, you’ll hear about it from students. Many new tools focus on ease of use and time savings, so you might discover that new approaches are easier than you imagine.
My point: you owe it to your students (and yourself) to make time to learn new skills, and you don’t have to go it alone. Seek assistance from the faculty development, educational technology, or online learning department on your campus.
Instructors think their PPTs are crystal clear
If your PPT slides are well designed for an in-person presentation, they are too cryptic to post as a standalone online presentation. Terse one- or two-word slides often are understood only by the person who wrote them or by experts in the field. To students, who are novices, more detail is needed to provide a fuller explanation. In person, you provide that detail by speaking. Online, you still need to provide the detail that the slides lack.
If, on the other hand, your PPT slides are an outline of lecture notes or are chock full of explanatory text and complex diagrams, then PPT is the wrong medium for posting that information online. Instead use media that work well online: web pages containing embedded links, images, audio clips, video clips, and the like.
My point: slides that seem the model of clarity to you are likely opaque to your students, and chopping lecture notes up onto multiple online slides won’t help. Instead, use the right tools for the job.
Instructors’ sense of self has become scarily entwined with their PPTs
You are not your PPT. If your PPT were as valuable as you, we wouldn’t need you to teach at all, would we? But you should have an inkling by now that posting a PPT online does not constitute a well-taught course. Online courses need active participation from a genuinely engaged instructor to make them successful.
My point: unlike you, your PPTs don’t have brains, insight, and something to contribute to society. Don’t give up your seat on the bus to your PPTs.
Instructors have gotten bad advice
Swept up in swine flu fever, some universities are recommending that faculty post their PPTs online, but they fail to warn instructors of the pitfalls of that approach, and they don’t all offer guidance about good ways to make material available online. Just as swine flu propagates through close contact and bad hygiene, bad PPT mythology spreads infectiously. Instructors see other instructors using PPT poorly and assume that’s the way it should be done. Don’t fall for it.
Many universities have departments whose job it is to be expert in instructional design, information design, and educational technology. Avail yourself of their services. Get some guidance and training in how to teach well online, how to design your materials for online delivery, and how to convert your PPTs into something more useful for online courses.
My point: just because other instructors use PPT badly doesn’t mean you should too.
Instructors don’t realize that not all students have equal access to PPT
Students don’t all have Microsoft Office, or they might have an older version that isn’t entirely compatible with the one instructors use to create presentations. PPTs created on Windows-based PCs don’t always display well on Macs, and tools available for Mac users aren’t on par with those for Windows users. These issues don’t matter when you project slides from your computer in an in-person classroom, but they matter a LOT when you post your PPT file online and then make the fallible assumption that students will be able to open it on whatever computer they use and see exactly the same thing you see on your computer.
Even more importantly, students who have disabilities and use assistive technologies such as screen readers might not be able to get at the information in your PPT at all unless you’ve carefully made it accessible. If your school receives federal funding, you need to be aware of Section 508 requirements to make information accessible. By posting inaccessible PPTs online and making them a required part of your course, you might invite a lawsuit.
My point: use tools that make your information available to all of your students, regardless of their preferred computing platform and need for assistive technology.
Any Exceptions?
The comments here generally apply to asynchronous online courses, those in which students can work on the course at whatever time is convenient for them, and there’s no expectation that everyone enrolled in the course will be online at the same time.
If you teach a synchronous online course, especially one that uses some kind of web conferencing features, then—assuming you’re going to be online in the course at the same time as your students and will be communicating actively with them—of course you can use your well-designed, nonboring PPTs, as long as you address the accessibility issues and fill in the gaps by using either audio or textual chat.
Dr. Judith V. Boettcher has written Teaching Online for the First Time — The Quick Guide. She lists ten best practices for designing and teaching a course, and most are spot on, with the possible exception of
Best Practice 5: Use both synchronous and asynchronous activities
Using both kinds of activities works only if your online students know up front that’s an expectation. Many students think online inherently means asynchronous, so be clear in your class description about whether synchronous activities are included in the course, and be sure to list the dates and times of the synchronous activities on a class preview page so students can figure out even before they register whether their school, work, and life schedules will permit them to be available at those times.
To Dr. Boettcher’s list, I’d add a few more implementation tips that the e-Learning Center has learned from years of working with faculty in preparing online and hybrid courses.
1. Don’t try to create an online course on the fly while you’re teaching it. You won’t like it and neither will your students.
If your in-person teaching style entails glancing at your notes—or not—a few minutes before class starts and then winging it by speaking extemporaneously, you’ll be tempted to approach online teaching the same way. Don’t do it. You’ll fumble with the technology (or it will go down at an inopportune time); you won’t have an adequate list of resources and supplemental materials available for your students; you’ll forget to include important details in your assignment instructions, confusing your students and sparking a flood of emails or discussion posts asking for clarification; and in an asynchronous course, your students will be irritated if they’re ready to proceed but you aren’t because you haven’t yet built out the course. They’re busy people, too, who don’t want you wasting their time.
2. Posting PowerPoint presentations online does not constitute an online course, no matter how many slides you include.
A bunch of bullet points out of context and lacking a speaker to fill in the details isn’t what students need. Neither are slides packed with overstuffed paragraphs. If you need to write paragraphs to convey your information, put them on a web page, not on a slide. Put the bullet points on web pages, too, and also write the information you would have said aloud in a face-to-face presentation. Or include an audio recording (with transcripts!) of what you would have said to accompany the slides.
Don’t expect students to intuit what you meant by your cryptic, one- or two-word bullets. What’s obvious to you—an expert— won’t be obvious to them—novices. Explain yourself.
3. Make your course accessible to all students, including those who have disabilities.
It’s easy and desirable in an online course to include clips of rich instructional media, such as videos and audio. Be sure to include captioning or transcripts so that all students get the full benefit of the media without having to ask for special accommodations. Even students who don’t have disabilities often appreciate captions and transcripts. Also make sure your course can be navigated easily with a keyboard, not just a mouse, and check with your campus Disability Resources office to be sure that screen reader software can interpret your course material.
Listening to Student Voices: Assessing and Responding to Students’ Experiences with Blackboard Learn
The Pedagogical Opportunities of Mobile Technologies: iPads and Kindles in the Classroom
(R)eflective Learning: The Experience of Journaling from Campus Edition to Bb Learn
From Vista 8 to Blackboard Learn 9.1— Lessons
