Webpage instead of slides: another way for lecture presentation
About Author: Dr. Peng Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, School of Sciences, XJTLU. His research focuses on the ecosystem-atmosphere exchange of atmospheric pollutants. He is the module leader of the environmental statistics modules ENV221 and ENV222, and invited to give lectures in ENV002, ENV117, ENV201, APH003, and the Postgraduate Research Students Training Programme (PGRSTP).
The original version of this document is a webpage (click here to see the online version), which I find is an alternative or even better way than using slides during online of Hyflex teaching and learning. In this document, the structure is shown in the top left corner. If you scroll down, you could briefly see interactive tables (e.g. Table 1) and images (e.g. Figure 1 and Figure 2) embedded, and they can be cross-referred. An answer could be hidden until the reader clicks it like this:
Q: Does a presentation document look like this article?
Click to see the answer
A: Mostly. A presentation document for teaching mainly contains the outlines, bullet items, tables, and figures.
In this article I will first introduce the background as well as the problem I encountered during my online teaching, then the way how I solved it with the webpage technique, and finally its limitations.
1 Background
Slide presentation (often called PPT in China) is a common way of teaching in Higher Education. A slide document, usually produced with Microsoft Powerpoint, \(\LaTeX\) Beamer, or Keynote, features pages/slides with landscape view, bullet lists, and fancy visual effects. However, PowerPoint has been criticized for reducing the quality and credibility of communications and wasting people’s time (Jones 2003; Tufte 2003) . A most recent meta-analysis (Baker et al. 2018) revealed that students’ learning based on PowerPoint is not improved when compared with traditional instruction methods.
2 Problems
Based on the feedback in the module questionnaires (MQs) and conversations with my students, I found that off-campus students are often confused with the logical structure of a single lecture or the entire module. This problem might be mainly because a slide presentation often breaks a logical thread/web into pieces and patches. For on-campus students, the teacher could explain the logical structure via face-to-face talks and live Q&A sessions, while for off-campus students, their learning takes place entirely online and they often miss the live sessions due to jet lag or inconvenient internet communications. In other words, off-campus students depend more on watching recorded lectures, reading the slides, and communicating via email.
It is hard for teachers to present the connections among slides. Due to the limited space of one slide, teachers always have to place the page breaker for separating slides, which somehow breaks the logical thread of the teaching content. Online learners usually go over the slides after class, and the slide documents often mislead learners to understand the knowledge they learn in a straight-line logic, while the knowledge itself is often nested or web-structured. One user of Zhihu (the most well-known Q&A forum in the Chinese community) complained that “some modules are too dependent on PPT” at XJTLU1.
3 The Solution and Its Benefits
Teachers could use webpages (HTML) to organize teaching materials instead of using slides. The advantages of webpages are as follows:
A nested or web-structured lecture or module can be better presented on a webpage with section numbering, different levels of headings, cross-references, etc. This article is a simple example. We could easily link any part to another, so that the online learners could understand the logic better. When they ask questions about a section or a figure via email, they could mention it (e.g. see Section 1 or Figure 1) easily for communicating with teachers.
Webpages are easy to maintain as long as they are hosted on a server such as GitHub Pages where this article is hosted. If there is something missing in the teaching materials, I just need to update the page without changing the hyperlink. Off-campus students don’t have to download the teaching materials again, which can ensure that they always see the newest teaching materials. An offline version is also available for students to download and use anywhere they prefer.
Webpages are more powerful than common slides. I could embed multimedia sources such as video clips, sounds, interactive tables (e.g. Table 1) and images (e.g. Figure 1 & Figure 2), and hidden parts into the webpage, which help easily attract the online students’ learning interests and attention.
Teaching materials organized on webpages have the potential to be developed into a textbook for publishing. The two books I published (Learning R and Modern Statistical Graphs) are both derived from webpage-organized materials.
Students from both modules ENV221 (previously ENV203) and ENV222 were surprised and happy with this new format. An ENV221 student commented, “I really appreciate the materials design page. The design of the website is quite clear and accessible.”
4 Limitations
My experience with webpage presentations comes from the statistics modules I lead. Although I believe it could be used widely, it might not suit some modules.
The technique for creating webpages is not well-known, although it is not difficult. R language users or Python users could easily learn this technique with the R Markdown packages or the Jupyter Notebook platform, while other users might need a couple of hours to learn.
5 Conclusion
As an alternative way of lecture presentation, a webpage document plays a better role in helping online learners in understanding and organizing the knowledge delivered in a module. Although it requires some techniques, it has the potential to be applied to other modules so as to improve the teaching quality. Moreover, it also benefits the onsite learners.
Appendix
References
Baker, James P, Alan K Goodboy, Nicholas D Bowman, and Alyssa A Wright. 2018. “Does Teaching with PowerPoint Increase Students’ Learning? A Meta-Analysis.” Computers & Education 126: 376–87.
Jones, Allan M. 2003. “The Use and Abuse of PowerPoint in Teaching and Learning in the Life Sciences: A Personal Overview.” Bioscience Education 2 (1): 1–13.
Tufte, Edward R. 2003. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Graphics Press Cheshire, CT.