The purpose for using PowerPoint in a presentation is to support you and your message. In an online presentation, you are still the presenter and you should be there. Narration lets you connect with students and set the context for the presentation. In this article I’ll discuss preparing a narration script for use when narrating your slides.

Why a script?
Don’t think that you can just “wing it” when narrating your slides. I supposed there are some people who can do this, but I can tell you that even with a script, it’s hard to get it exactly right without doing a number of “takes.” For one thing, it’s really easy to trip on your words even with a script. So it’s inevitable that you’ll record narration multiple times in order to sound the way you want to sound. If you try to do it without a script, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to rerecord a multitude of times, more times than if you prepare a script.

In addition, writing a script helps you think through the sequencing of your slides and the best way to present what you are talking about. Once you start adding narration text to go along with your slides, you’ll see holes in your presentation where you need to add slides and places where you need to change the order of the presentation. So the script helps you think through the best way to present your content.

Preparing the script
Writing a narration script is about writing words for students to hear, not read. And that difference makes all the difference.

To write listening-friendly scripts, you’ll want to do some things a bit differently than when you are writing for reading. Audio should sound friendly and conversational. Use contractions and feel free to use sentence fragments, just like you would use in conversation. Use a friendly tone.

Practice reading the script aloud before you narrate the slides and fix anything that sounds stuffy or awkward. When reading your script aloud, you are bound to find words, phrases, and sections that need rewriting. Try to use less complex sentences, because complex sentences can be confusing to follow. Complex sentences can be reread when written, but having to replay an entire slide is more frustrating than rereading a sentence.

Write the script so that you aren’t tempted to ad-lib. What I mean is, if you think it might be good to put in a few comments that sound off-the-cuff, write them into the script, and don’t try to ad-lib them while narrating.

Plan audio “white space” and try not to talk too long on a given slide. If you have a block of dense text, plan where you will stop and take a breath and write it in the script as WAIT or BREATHE. If you have a lot of text on a single slide, consider how to make your wording more concise; if you need to keep all the text, consider dividing the narration among two or more slides.

Creating narration scripts in PowerPoint
PowerPoint makes it very easy to create a narration script. Simply write the narration that goes along with each slide in the Slide Notes pane that appears below each slide in Normal View, as shown below.

Once you enter the narration for each slide, output the script by selecting Publish from the Office button in the top left corner (PowerPoint 2007 and 2010) and then selecting Create Handouts in Microsoft Word> Notes next to slides.

PowerPoint will send thumbnails of your slides and the narration (notes) for each slide script to Microsoft Word and you’ll have a Word document with each slide and the corresponding narration. An example of one row of the table created during this process appears below.

In this section, I’ll be discussing the research surveys and questions related to synchronous e-learning. Although technologies such as chat and IM are considered synchronous e-learning, I’ll be mainly talking about virtual classroom technologies here

Voila! Your narration script! To use this Word narration script, I print it and use it when narrating my slides.

Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a widely recognized information and instructional designer and writer and author, who helps others build valuable information and instruction. She can be reached through her website: www.learningpeaks.com.

Reprinted from Online Teaching Fundamentals: Making Online PowerPoint Content Engaging: Writing a Narration Script. Online Classroom (January 2011): 4,5.

In this article I’ll provide information about how to improve your use of PowerPoint as an online teaching and learning tool. I know that there are a ton of fancier tools to use for creating online content, but PowerPoint is widely used and likely to stay that way, at least for the near future. So we ought to use it well!

The upside of PowerPoint
PowerPoint is widely used because it’s easy to learn how to use it and many people already know how to use it. It’s become a standard means for communicating ideas in many organizations. And a number of today’s easier-to-use and very popular e-learning authoring tools make use of PowerPoint slides.

PowerPoint makes it easy to build slides. And the content in slides and the slides themselves are easily editable or copied into other PowerPoint slide decks, which makes revisions and reuse of content simple.
If you build content for your online courses, you’ve no doubt figured out that building a set of PowerPoint slides (with or without narration) is straightforward and doesn’t require much experience. Some of the other tools you can use for creating online content have a much steeper learning curve, and many have considerable technical considerations to deal with. The average content expert or faculty member can usually build PowerPoint content with little or no assistance.

It’s uh…visual
PowerPoint, when used alone, is primarily a visual communications tool. So it is best used for content that is visual. For example, the following types of content work well on PowerPoint slides:

• Pictures
• Drawings
• Screenshots
• Graphs
• Charts

Notice that the word “text” isn’t on the list. Surprised? Well of course you can put text on your PowerPoint slides and you probably will BUT…text is where most PowerPoint users start to get into trouble. They put too many words on slides and tend to put them into dreaded bullet lists.

Too many people put whole paragraphs on slides. Don’t! Think of ways to be as concise with text as possible, including using an image instead of words. Images of all types are great for slides because slides contain a finite amount of space and a graphic can take the place of many, many words. Plus, we remember images better than we remember words, all other things being equal.

The downside of PowerPoint
The main downside to using PowerPoint as a communication tool has to do more with how we use PowerPoint than with PowerPoint itself. The following table describes things we commonly do with PowerPoint that we simply shouldn’t do, and what we should do instead.

Other nontechnical ways to add activity include:

• providing a list of questions that students should answer as they view your presentation,
• supplying activities that the student should complete related to the presentation,
• asking students to prepare additional content to add to the presentation, and
• requesting that students create collaborative notes from the presentation using a wiki or collaborative document creation or editing tool (such as Google docs).

One idea I have used that worked well was to ask students to answer a question in the discussion area before I posted my presentation. Then I asked them to add to that initial post after viewing my presentation (which was specifically created to change their minds on the topic of the presentation). This helped them consider how new information about a topic helps them reconsider what they thought they knew.

Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a widely recognized information and instructional designer and writer and author who helps others build valuable information and instruction. She can be reached through her website: www.learningpeaks.com.

Excerpted from PowerPoint and Online Learning, Part 1. Online Classroom, April 2010, 4-5.

Bottom line: Just like initial course development, updating courses can be quite a lot of work. You can reduce the hassles and work (but not eliminate them) by designing your online courses with updating them in mind. That is, design so that updating is built into the process, not tacked on as an afterthought.

Identify change-likely elements
Most course designers start with a list of objectives or topics and then design the course elements, including content (such as narrated slides, reading materials, animations, audio clips, etc.), activities for students to do (such as answer discussion questions, review a site, perform tasks, etc.), and assessments (such as programs, reports, and tests).

High-level design tables, such as the one below, are often used to organize what will happen in the course. A high-level design table is then typically used to inform more-detailed design, including the design, development, integration, and testing of all the course elements.

One way to reduce the (unexpected) hassle in course updating is to identify up front the elements that are less likely to need updating and the elements that are more likely to need updating. Elements that are less likely to need updating may include content that doesn’t change and won’t need a what’s-happening-now focus. For a business writing course, for example, grammar rules are unlikely to change, so the content, activities, and assessments around those rules are likely to be stable. That doesn’t mean you won’t ever change it. In fact, you may indeed change it, for reasons discussed later.

Elements that are more likely to need updating may include content that normally changes over time (for example, certain science and Web design topics) and topics that are closely aligned with current events (for example, government and law topics).

To reduce update surprises, make note of elements likely to need changes and how often they likely will need updating when you are designing your courses. You could color-code the elements in your high-level design or use unique symbols that indicate when the element needs to be reevaluated for updating. Also note whether changes in those elements will cause update issues elsewhere in the course. For example, changes in content commonly necessitate changes in assessments.

Then, while the content and course are fresh, create an update plan so that when you get ready to update, you already know what needs to be done. This will save you time, energy, and hassles because you won’t need to start from scratch in determining how to go about updating.

Changes likely anyway
Certain aspects of your courses are going to change over time, even if the content itself is fairly stable. These include changes in textbooks, readings, and other “outside” content and changes to technologies (used for teaching and learning online).

When new versions of a textbook or a new textbook altogether is used, it is likely to impact all the other elements of your course. If you know that a new version of the textbook becomes available every X years, you should factor that time period into your course updating plans. The more closely your course content, activities, and assessments are tied to a text or readings, the more updating will be needed when that text or those readings change.

To reduce course update (and other) hassles, a bioethics professor I know “unhooks” the text and readings from the other content, activities, and assessments, and I think this approach could work for others as well. She supplies a list of readings (including the textbook) and time frames for reading them to students, but these readings are not in strict lockstep with other course content. Her goal is to provide foundational information in the time period before students will need it to understand the other content she supplies. She does pull test questions from these readings, so she has to update the test each time she updates the readings.

Another way to reduce updates caused by changes in readings is to develop general activity and assessment templates that can be used with minor tweaks as readings are changed. For example, an activity template that prompts students to select and justify the most significant influence/reason/outcome can be used with a variety of readings and isn’t tied to a very specific reading or readings. These kinds of templates can be developed to match the desired learning outcomes and tweaked to map to specific content as it changes.

Over time, the tools and technologies available to you inside and outside of your course management system will change as well, and this will influence how you “do” your course. For example, collaborative document creation tools (such as Google Docs) or easy-to-create media development tools (such as Google SketchUp) may change how your course works and the way you present content. This is to be expected and is, in my opinion, one of the fun parts about being involved in online course creation and delivery.

Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a widely recognized information and instructional designer and writer and author who helps others build valuable information and instruction. She can be reached through her website: www.learningpeaks.com.

Excerpted from Online Classroom, January 2010, 4-5.

If you teach or design online courses, you may be looking for ways to do things differently as well. Maybe have more fun. Engage yourself and your students more. The first thing to do may be to think differently about how your courses should work. Get out of a rut or the don’t-fix-it-if-it-ain’t-broke way of thinking. I face some typical objections when I try to convince instructors and instructional designers to try new approaches.

Why fix it if it ain’t broke?
Some folks tell me it’s silly to mess with what works. Thinking through how you can do whatever it is you do better is a mark of professional excellence in any field. Do you have courses that lack “umph”? Where students seem to just be going through the motions? Too many dropouts or no-shows? Then it’s past time for making some changes, and I’m hoping to help.

Some instructors tell me that their subject matter is inherently boring. No subject is inherently boring. Courses are boring if the instructor is bored or boring. Courses can be boring if the content and assignments are unimaginative. Courses are often boring if the course content and assignments aren’t connected to the world around us.

We’ll start our journey by looking at one approach that can be used to improve the connection between you and your online students early in the course.

In many online courses, it takes a while for students to connect with the instructor and other students. Asynchronous communications (typically through email and discussion postings) take time; time for a reply; time to understand what someone means; time to get a feeling for the course, instructors, and other students. And this delay makes some students, especially those who are new to online courses, feel like they are in a large city but are all alone. This can be a huge problem, and it’s one we don’t do enough to rectify. Students who begin online courses with concerns—about the difficulty of the content and course, about using unfamiliar course systems, and about staying motivated and on track—are worried and looking for reasons to either be less worried or jump ship.

Research shows that online course dropout rates are affected by many things, including not being firmly engaged and successful early on. There are many ways to create opportunities for early engagement, but the opportunity to be engaged live with the instructor and other students early on can short-circuit the time and effort needed to feel connected (and likely to stay) as well as allay concerns about learning online.

You may think this is crazy. Your students may be all over the world. And they typically take online courses because they want the flexibility to attend whenever it is convenient for them. But chances are that quite a few do want to connect with you and will go out of their way to do so.

There are numerous tools that can help you connect live with students. You can use them to do introductions early on, answer questions throughout the course, hold office hours, meet with members of project teams, and so on. Some of these may be available within your course management system, but if these tools aren’t available or are available but don’t work too well, there are many free or very inexpensive tools that can be used

Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a widely recognized information and instructional designer, writer, and author, who helps others build valuable information and instruction. She can be reached through her website: www.learningpeaks.com/.

Excerpted from Online Teaching Fundamentals: You, Live: Pump Up Your Online Courses, Part 1, November 2008, Online Classroom.

Misconception: Outcomes are the only things worth measuring.

Reality: Outcomes, such as numbers of new courses developed, enrollments, retention, and satisfaction levels, are important and they should be measured. But it’s also important to evaluate critical processes, such as support for faculty course development, relationships between course designers and developers and faculty, and student ability to get help as needed.

The processes that are involved in producing and delivering online courses and instruction should be evaluated alongside the outcomes of these processes so it’s possible to see what changes would allow for better outcomes.

I recently worked with an institution that had an adversarial relationship between faculty and the online course development team, and both spent time pointing fingers to explain why the results weren’t optimal. What they didn’t see was that this adversarial relationship created bottlenecks and course development problems. Obvious solution? Build a better process and fix the damage caused by the old one.

If the process of producing and delivering online courses and instruction is problematic, courses and instruction are also likely to be problematic—and these problems are unlikely to improve without improving the process. So, while evaluating outcomes, it’s also important to evaluate the processes that impact those outcomes. You will find inefficiencies, poor relationships, rework, contention, and more that are making better outcomes difficult or impossible.

Misconception: Evaluation is a CYA activity to be endured.

Reality: The purpose of evaluation should be to continuously improve, not to check off boxes on a checklist and then breathe a sigh of relief until evaluation needs to be done again.

Most higher education institutions conduct end-of-course evaluations, but this kind of evaluation often doesn’t result in significant improvements to courses and cannot impact courses in progress.

Because end-of-course evaluations may be required but often aren’t sufficient, some online instructors have begun to implement weekly or bimonthly anonymous evaluations by students so they can make changes to the course and the process in the here and now.

Bottom line? The purpose of evaluating online courses and instruction should be improvement, not pain. And improvement efforts are most successful when they are valuable to all concerned. So analyze whether the misconceptions described in this article apply to your institution—and if some do, consider how to change them for the better.

Course and Instructor Evaluation: If It’s So Good, Why Does It Feel So Bad? excerpted from Online Classroom, January 2008.

One especially valuable technique was consistent use of self-check exercises. These were handed out at the end of each class along with an answer sheet. Class started each time with a question-and-answer period about the self-check exercises from the previous session. Doing the exercises was optional and they weren’t handed in or graded, but nearly everyone did them, and the folks who did easily gained confidence and passed the course.

What are self-check exercises, exactly? They are problems (with answers) given to learners that allow them to assess how they are doing on an ongoing basis. Doing them online with self-grading provides immediate feedback. Links to additional materials can be provided to help anyone who is having difficulties. Online learners can do these exercises and submit questions they have, which the instructor can aggregate and respond to for the benefit of all learners.

Studies show that these types of activities help learners keep tabs on their progress and adjust their efforts, know when to seek help, and stay on track. These outcomes are especially important in online courses.

Some of the most important benefits of self-check exercises for online learning include:

• Helping learners determine what they do and do not understand so they can target where extra study is needed.
• Providing immediate feedback to learners and an option to link to additional materials (which may reduce the number of unfocused questions sent to the instructor).
• Providing feedback to the instructor about where learners are having difficulties so immediate interventions can be implemented.
• Increasing learner satisfaction with the instructor and the course.

Getting Started
Consider how self-check exercises can be used in the courses you teach. Are there concepts that learners consistently have problems understanding? Are there terms that learners need to memorize or concepts that they need to understand? These might be the best places to start.

Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a widely recognized instructional designer and instructional technologist, and writer who builds and helps others build good online and blended courses and facilitates learning. She can be reached through her website: http://www.learningpeaks.com.

Excerpted from Online Classroom, Feb. 2007.

Some plusses and minuses to multiple-choice tests
Multiple-choice tests can be developed for many different types of content and, if the test items are well written, can measure achievement of multiple levels of learning objectives, from simple recall and comprehension to more complex levels, such as ability to analyze a situation, apply principles, discriminate, interpret, judge relevance, select best solutions, and so on.

Multiple-choice tests are easy to administer and can be improved using item analysis in order to eliminate or correct poorly written items. They are easy to score and less susceptible to scoring subjectivity than short-answer or essay-type items. They don’t measure writing ability (which can be a plus or minus) and often do assess reading ability (another potential plus or minus, but in reality often a minus). They are more subject to guessing than many other types of learning assessments.

Multiple-choice tests are often promoted as “objective.” Although scoring them doesn’t involve subjectivity, humans do judge what questions to ask and how to ask them. These are very subjective decisions!

When multiple-choice is appropriate
Multiple-choice test items call for learners to select an answer or answers from a list of alternatives. Because they do not ask learners to construct an answer or actually perform, they tend to measure knowing about rather than knowing how.

Multiple-choice items cannot assess learners’ ability to construct, build, or perform. They are best used for objectives that can be assessed by selecting the correct answer from a list of choices rather than supplying the answer or performing a task. Think for a moment about how different selecting is from constructing and performing and you’ll recognize the limitations of multiple-choice testing.

• Provide clear directions. Group questions with the same directions together.
• Include as much of the question as possible in the stem, and reduce wordiness of alternatives.
• Include words in the stem that would otherwise be repeated in each of the alternatives.
• Make sure language is precise, clear, and unambiguous. Include qualifiers as needed, but don’t add unnecessary information or irrelevant sources of difficulty.
• Avoid highly technical language or jargon unless technical knowledge and jargon are part of the assessment.
• Avoid negatives and these words: always, often, frequently, never, none, rarely, and infrequently. When a negative is used, it should be CAPITALIZED, underlined, or bolded to call attention to it.
• Don’t use double negatives or double-barreled questions (asking two things in one question).

Although it takes time and practice to write good items, this time and effort is well spent.

Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a widely recognized instructional designer and technologist, writer, and author who builds and helps others build good online courses and facilitate learning. She can be reached through her website: http://www.learningpeaks.com/.

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