In 1998, I had my first full-time job as a computer-graphic designer in a media center at Indiana State University. The word “computer” in my job title differentiated me from the other graphic designers in the office. While they produced print materials like banners and posters designed in Photoshop or Illustrator, I didn’t do much of the drawing and printing, because to me, the word “computer” meant but one thing—PowerPoint!

PowerPoint, believe it or not, was a high-end, technical tool at the time (meaning higher than overhead transparencies). My job was to produce PowerPoint slides for televised distance-learning courses. I remember getting those highlighted textbooks from faculty and typing page after page of content into PowerPoint slides. I remember the “wows” from faculty thrilled to see text flying in line by line. I remember the same thrilling feeling I had myself when my designer peers asked me whether the animated presentations I created were really done with MS PowerPoint—“It looks like a (Macromedia) Director product,” they said. Soon I was crowned “the PowerPoint guru.”

Yet, deep in my heart, I knew that this glory would not last long: my crown would become an old hat once other users figured out my tricks—or worse, they would be discovered by the vendor, who would then make them part of the application. I thought this would happen within a couple of years.

So I was shocked a few months ago when an associate vice president of my institution asked me about offering a PowerPoint workshop, because she had seen too many presenters that “were sorely in need of training on how to give effective PowerPoint presentations.”

After thirteen years, with all the comings and goings of dazzling new tools, guess what? We are back to PowerPoint!

I was even more shocked when I learned that the enrollment of the workshop (Beyond the Bulletpoint: How To Design Low-Tech High-Effect Presentations) reached thirty-two in a matter of days and the event organizer was asking me whether we should close it or offer another session. Oh, come on, we can’t close it! It was my good old PowerPoint staying cool in the era of Web 2.0! And besides, isn’t it wonderful to know that after more than a decade, people are still interested in my tricks (I mean, they still haven’t got them yet)?

I guess this has been a long enough teaser. Let me get to the meat of this entry: the tricks.

My tricks in using PowerPoint are as simple as following two basic rules: a) avoid PowerPoint sins and b) inject creativity into the presentation design.

Avoid PowerPoint Sins

I consider the following behaviors sinful for any PowerPoint presentation:

• Sin I: Long, Massive Text Blocks

This means more than six lines of content with a font size smaller than 18. Anyone who throws full-blown paragraphs into the slides is asking PowerPoint to serve as a teleprompter and forgetting the fact that those things are supposed to be hidden from the audience.

• Sin II: Long, Full-Sentenced Bullet Points

This might be less sinful than paragraphs, but it still makes it impossible for the audience to grasp the key points no matter how loudly you read them. (And by the way, reading from the slide doubles the sin.)

• Sin III: Unnecessary Decorative Elements

Unless your audience is too immature or intellectually challenged to understand your concepts, you should control the use of clip art. I still feel ashamed of this slide I created thirteen years ago. The clip art of the tool box is nothing but an insult to college students.

• Sin IV: Excessive Use of Animation

With the infusion of all sorts of digital gadgets, our world is already overanimated. Unless it carries some meaning, animation is merely annoying (see the next section for the meaningful use of animation).

• Sin V: Serif Font Type and Low-Contrast Color Schemes

Picky as it may sound, text in Times New Roman in a PowerPoint screams that it was created by a nonprofessional designer. Those little semistructural details at the end of some of the strokes aren’t reader friendly for at-a-glance or on-screen reading. And common sense will tell you that any dark texts on a black or blue background aren’t reader friendly either. Our daily writing media is black text on a white background, which can teach us a simple but very useful lesson on what is the friendliest combination of colors.

Inject Creativity into Presentation Design

I love reading the debate on whether creativity is teachable. This year’s International Conference on College Teaching and Learning frames the question as, “Creativity: Art or Science?” I believe creativity is a mix of art and science: while it does require a fair amount of natural talent, cognizant exposure to innovative ideas and procedures will stimulate creative sparks within the ordinary.

Over the years, I’ve seen many great presentations—with and without the use of PowerPoint. The ones that have used PowerPoint usually used it to serve the following four purposes:

To inform, to illustrate, to inspire, and to prepare.

1. To Inform

In most cases, PowerPoint is used as a visual aid for content delivery during lectures and presentations. People use it to get their point across. But the best way to get the point across is not by throwing out the points. I found that when information is presented in a story-telling way, it’s easier for the audience to comprehend. The following video didn’t offer any text-based definition or bullet points of Google Wave features; instead it used animated graphics to tell us a story of e-mail. Can the same be achieved with PowerPoint? My answer is yes.

2. To Illustrate

In order to combat the laziness of human brain, Dr. Chris Atherton from the School of Psychology of the University of Central Lancashire offered some strategies in designing PowerPoint slides:

As you might have noticed, this presentation didn’t use any of the given templates in PowerPoint. For most of the slides, it is black text over a plain white background. Also, it contains no animation and is, therefore, well suited for online viewing via Slideshare. The plain design makes the plain truths that the author wants to share stand out without interruption.

In other cases, animation can be a powerful tool to keep the viewer focused on the flow of information, like in this presentation I did last year on online teamwork (click on the image below to access the presentation on Slideboom):

3. To Inspire

TED.com, which is my favorite Web site, inspires me not only with their presenters but also by some of its creative PowerPoint design. Look at this one by Larry Lessig on “Laws that Choke Creativity” and feel the choreographic harmony between speech and slide show. In this case, the power of the PowerPoint lies in its ability to strike on the key ideas at the right moment.

TED.com assured me that by delivering the best and the brightest directly to our computer screens, technology is breaking through the knowledge monopoly! Someday we might move into an age of presentation Darwinism where the mediocre can no longer survive as people click through the Internet to view and rate only the best content. Until then, sites like TED.com have at least helped set up a high bar in terms of presentation design.

4. To Prepare

Lastly, I have seen PowerPoint being used as a notebook provided to the students by the instructors before, during, or after class. This kind of PowerPoint can be as self-sufficient as a textbook that allows students to prepare for class or an exam or to save them from having to take notes in class. Projecting these slides on the screen to guide an in-class lecture can be dangerously boring (if nothing else, just the dimmed light induces the desire to doze off). These slides are more suited to be a handout than a presentation, but if you really want to use it, you can try to remove some key concepts so as to stimulate some brainstorming from students.

The other option takes some time, but PowerPoint does allow us to create minitutorials by hyperlinking text and graphics between slides.

Do you have any creative ideas in using good, old PowerPoint? Post them here so we can share.

Students are not fond of teamwork, especially when it’s online. That is one of the findings of my dissertation, which explores the relationship between online students’ interpersonal needs and interaction preference. Nine years have passed since I received my Ph.D., and this unfavorable feeling toward teamwork still seems to be present to a large extent for online students.

Both of the two online students invited to speak at our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program stressed that they were not interested in building the so-called learning community or social network through any collaborative project. One of them pointed out that after contemplating the costs and benefits of conducting a group project, he decided to give it up. “That two points for the grade isn’t worth the pain of having to deal with a guy [the assigned team member] who had never returned my calls or e-mail,” M. J., a student from the School for New Learning, told us.

The fact that students are thinking about whether “it’s worth it or not” sends a strong signal to faculty and online-course designers. Is the teamwork required by the course worth the “extra” time and effort that students have to put in? The answer to this question depends on the goals and objectives of a course. As with all the other learning activities, the use of teamwork should be driven by the desired outcomes of a course. Rethink incorporating any team project if you don’t expect or cannot afford the time for students to meet the following objectives in a course:

• Multiple perspectives among students
• Team-building knowledge and skills
• Competency in technology-mediated communication
• An understanding of various processes of learning (or “no one right ‘path’ to the result”)
• Resolution of both cognitive conflict and affective conflict

I admire course quality standards that make collaborative learning an optional item rather than a required one, because as powerful as it is, this strategy might not be appropriate for every course or every discipline. But if you do find a strong match between the course goal and the teamwork activity, do it very seriously by giving it enough time, points, and support to make it “worth it” for the students.

I came across an article this month by Staggers, Garcia, and Nagelhout on “Teamwork through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online,” in which the authors argue that “teamwork most successfully occurs after team building, and too often this team building is lacking in online environments.”   I think this is the exact reason why teamwork has become an oxymoron for many online courses: it has been thrown at the students without anything to prepare them for it or any guidance to support them (one online introduction isn’t enough).

Over the past ten years, I have been working with Dr. Pete Mikolaj, a professor from the School of Business at Indiana State University, to experiment with collaborative problem solving in the online environment. We’ve used his insurance and risk-management courses as the test bed to implement a number of strategies to engage students in a group project, which serves as the main outcome of the course. Among the various ideas we’ve tested, the following strategies were found to be very effective for online teamwork:

Heavy Weight on Teamwork

• Make the project weigh 50 percent of the total score or more (since it constitutes a major goal of course)

Heavy Weight on the Process of the Teamwork

• Give 50 percent weight to the process (involvement) of the project and 50 percent to the product (final report)
• Interim evaluation given about six weeks into project based solely on process (teamwork)

Frequent Progress Monitoring

• Weekly project log required from each team member
• A weekly team log is produced
• The log builds accountability and transparency

Clear Policy on Reward and Punishment

• Peer/self evaluation allows +/- 15 percent deviation from team grade to create individual grade
• Self-evaluation counts one third and peer evaluation counts two thirds
• Individuals can be fired from the team for nonperformance

Guidance from Faculty

• Weekly synchronous session with the instructor that primarily involves discussion of projects. Sessions are recorded and available for viewing throughout the term
• Sample project reports from prior classes are available from the first week of the semester

When it comes to online courses, the choice of teamwork is not “to do or not to do” but rather “to do it well or not to do it at all.”  So, before adding any teamwork into the learning activities, think twice about the “why,” and then (if it’s a good fit), work hard on the “how,” because that is the only way to make teamwork work.

No one likes to read learning objectives.  Okay, this might be too extreme a statement.  Let me rephrase to make it sound more academically correct: no one, other than instructional designers, academic creditors, faculty/syllabus-writers, or students who are bored to tears, likes to read learning objectives—unless they are short, punchy, and, hence, super retainable! 

As an instructional-design professional, I fit into the category of learning-objectives reviewers.  I have a tendency to browse through the objectives portion of various documents: course syllabi, training brochures, webinar announcements, and even activity notices from my kids’ school.  I look at them not to learn purpose of the events but rather to catch “violators” of our learning-objective rules:  “to understand”… vague word; “to improve” … but how; “to be able to” … under what condition!

The latest “violator” that I encountered was Dr. David Allbritton, from DePaul’s psychology department.  A few weeks ago, he gave a presentation at an online-learning seminar, where he shared the learning objectives of his online psychology course, and it looked like this:

• Think like a scientist
• Know stuff
• Figure stuff out
• Feel connected
• Find it relevant
• Don’t cheat

Maybe this was just an abbreviated list of objectives for the sake of a presentation (with the audience being psychology amateurs), but wow, talk about violations worthy of ticketing and fines! My need for a rewrite became so compelling that within a minute, new objectives showed up in my mind:

Now tell me which one you like, mine or his?  Or, to phrase it in a different way, which one is easier to comprehend and to remember?

As an audience of a presentation, I must say that I like Dr. Allbritton’s objectives, which grabbed my attention right away with his “stuff.”   And hey, isn’t “gain attention” the very first step of Gagne’s “Nine Events of Instruction”?   Okay, his second one is “inform learners of objectives”, but if your handout, syllabus, or presentation doesn’t allow you the space or time to “holler,” wouldn’t it be nice to use your objectives as an attention grabber?  If the magazines are doing it (e.g. “Lose 10 Pound in a Day,” a suspicious but nevertheless clear and straightforward objective) and the book publishers are doing it (e.g. How to Cook Everything, an ambitious objective embedded even in the title itself), why can’t an academic learning guide, such as a syllabus, be made as easy to grasp as they are?   I am not talking about an effort to commercialize or “sexy up” our academic lingo for the sake of sensationalism.  Because often, it doesn’t need that.  Being straightforward is all it takes to win the bid.  Simple expressions, such as to know, to apply, to become, to evaluate, and to change tells students exactly what to expect from the course, from the fundamental or theoretical (to know) to the practical or methodological (to apply) to the ideological or believed (to become or to think like).

Having gained my attention and that of the rest of the audience, Dr. Allbritton was able to further explain the strategies he used to ensure the achievement of each target in the same simple and direct way.  As someone who’s used to seeing and giving presentations in multislide mode, I found the following one-page handout of his demonstrated, in a clean and clear fashion, a great way of matching instructional strategies with learning objectives:   

“Change,” a slogan of the Obama campaign, is undoubtedly winning its own presidential bid in the buzzword competition. The word “change,” probably of Celtic origin, is defined as an action to make different or to shift from one to another (Merriam-Webster OnLine). It can mean anything from a slight alteration to a radical transformation. When it comes to education, I think that change is, in fact, the ultimate goal of teaching and learning: change from unknown to known, from viewing things from one level to viewing them from another, and from systematic knowledge acquisition to an individualized, conscious battle of lucidity (Morin, 1999; George Siemens 2008). And that ultimate form of change as a result of learning is called “transformational learning.”

About a month ago, I attended a session on language learning and VoIP at the Wisconsin Distance Learning Conference. The presenter, Kerrin Barret, shared the findings of her dissertation studying a cross-cultural language-learning community supported by synchronous VoIP. Although her focus was on the role of VoIP in improving cultural and linguistic competencies, she found (with pleasant surprise, I am sure) that transformational learning occurred across participant groups in the online English-language-learning program, which involved teachers from the United States and students from Taiwan and mainland China. One of the themes that emerged from her study was that by participating in this online program, either as teachers or students, her study population became interculturally competent, which made them view the world as well as themselves differently. This perspective change echoes Merizow’s definition of “transformational learning”: a “disorienting dilemma” occurs in an adult learner’s life to cause her or him to reflect critically, with the end result that the individual’s conception of him/herself and worldview is inexorably changed.

During the presentation, I asked Kerrin, the session participants, and especially myself a question: should transformational learning be made a specific goal of our programs? The follow-up question in my mind was: will making it a goal of the programs give them a better chance to achieve the result, since curriculum design is becoming more and more goal-driven? At that moment, two examples came to my mind: my Chinese language class and DOTS, our faculty development program. For the former, I always wanted to make the class go beyond just the words and grammars; and for the latter, we have been striving to make an impact on faculty’s view and practice of teaching instead of just developing a couple online courses.

In seeking an answer to my own question, I thought about why transformational learning has not been made a goal of either my class or our program. I saw two reasons: 1) the goal seems to be so far above the ground for any teacher and student to achieve over the course of a class or a program; and 2) desirable as it is, making a class or a program a transformational learning experience to anyone doesn’t seem to be a demandable task, nor can it be measured easily with any form of standards. And when it comes to faculty development, a third reason is that faculty are put off by being preached to, which they see as humiliating.

This debate of “to be or not to be” is actually well documented in the literature of transformational learning, where two seemingly different views of transformational learning are presented: one view, represented by Mezirow, emphasizes rationality or rational, critical reflection; and the other, led by Boyd and Meyer, stresses the intuitive and emotional nature of the transformational process.

As a big follower of Etienne Wenger, I tend to agree with Boyd and Meyer because, as Wenger pointed out, “learning cannot be designed.” (Note: he didn’t say instruction cannot be designed, so that’s no job-security threat to instructional designers.) “Ultimately, it (learning) belongs to the realm of experience and practice. It follows the negotiation of meaning; it moves on its own terms. It slips through the cracks; it creates its own cracks. Learning happens, design or no design.” (Wenger, 1998)

If the result of transformational learning is so personal and hence uncontrollable, what can we, the educators, do to help one achieve this ultimate form of learning? Despite their different views on the process of transformational learning, all researchers and theorists seem to agree that educators play a significant role in the student’s perspective transformation, and “fostering transformative learning in the classroom depends to a large extent on establishing meaningful, genuine relationships with students” (Cranton, 2006, cited by Karrin 2008).

“Relationship” is the key word that I picked from this passage. As factual information becomes more and more accessible to everyone in its various forms of presentation, the role of educators is changing from knowledge carriers to relationship builders, trust agents, mentors, and role models for students. A class or a program provides us an opportunity to serve in that support role of difference-making.

If change is now a dream of all Americans, a dream of a transformational change as a result of learning should, then, be a “secret” goal of all American educators. It is an explicit but unstated goal with the greatest reward for both the teachers and the learners. The “medal” was awarded when a student in Kerrin’s study said, “I feel from learning I am different”; my dream came true when a student wrote me a card saying, “you taught me more than Chinese but how to be a considerate and caring person;” our goal was met when faculty said in their interviews, “DOTS makes me think about teaching differently.”