You’re likely to have a number of slides and handouts from your face-to-face course that can be readily employed in an online environment. We recommend taking a closer look at tools that can help you enhance your online courses with creatively and powerfully designed presentations:
There are many challenges to using slides even in traditional settings with a skilled and engaging lecturer. These challenges are compounded online, especially when slideshows are used not simply as visual aids but as the primary conveyor of the message itself. It may seem self-evident, but it bears repeating: a series of bullet points cannot replace the words and ideas they are intended to summarize.
In short: Caveat praeceptor. Putting a slideshow on the web is not "putting a lecture on the web," although it can be one component of a good instructional presentation.
PowerPoint is the most commonly used tool for making presentation visuals and is available to all FSU faculty, staff, and students through the university's Microsoft license. Keeping the above recommendations in mind, use this section to enhance your use of this familiar speaker’s tool:
PowerPoint slideshows need not proceed in a linear, lockstep fashion, especially when students are controlling the progress of slides downloaded from a course site. Nonlinear presentations provide a more interactive environment for your students to explore content. You may use nonlinear PowerPoint slides to create storyboarding, quiz questions, etc., with a menu, home page, and navigational buttons. View this example of a nonlinear slide presentation. To learn more, watch this video that guides you through the process of creating a nonlinear slide presentation.
Alternatives to the traditional, text-heavy design of PowerPoint include the Takahashi method and the Lessig method. The Takahashi method forgoes charts, color pictures, and bullet lists for large, concise text—typically ten characters or fewer—on a single slide. A similar approach is the Lessig method, which uses slides that often contain a single word or photo. Both approaches may be more useful in a face-to-face presentation than online, for reasons noted in the Recommendations section above.