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Create lecture slides

This page provides guidelines you can apply in creating and designing your lecture slides, based on Mayer’s multimedia principles.

Why creating clear lecture slides is useful

Ensure your slide deck is supporting the story you are trying to get across, and contributes to all students’ learning experience, by applying the guidelines below.

Guidelines for slides

Mayer’s Principle

Activity

Coherence

Simplify your slides: does each element support learning or comprehension? If not, can it be removed?

Signalling

  • Highlight important pieces of information in your slides (e.g. highlights or bold markings).
  • An extra slide can be added to separate different topics in your presentation (signalling a new topic is being covered).
  • In visuals, e.g. arrows can be used to indicate important parts. This will also enhance accessibility of your slides.

Redundancy

Do not read your slides aloud, but add keywords to the slide and elaborate during the lecture.

Spatial and Temporal Contiguity

  • Place relevant text and visuals close together on your slide.
  • Make sure e.g. visuals are shown at the same time as you discuss/explain them.

Segmenting

Present information in your slide in different segments.

Modality and Multimedia

  • Combine meaningful visuals with (some) text.
  • Preferably provide a verbal explanation over providing text on your slide.

Personalisation

Personalise your tone of voice by using the first person (e.g. you, I, our, we).

Self-explanation

Consider prompting students to explain some parts of the lecture to each other to enhance their learning process (e.g. using Vevox).

Drawing

  • Another interesting learning activity to integrate in your lecture is to have students create a drawing.
  • Active engagement is needed in drawing to translate (spoken textual) information into a drawing representing (relationships between) elements included in the information.
  • This might be implemented e.g. at the end of the lecture, to summarise the contents covered.

 

Accessibility

Ensure that your content is suited for people with varied abilities and that everyone is included in the learning experience by applying these accessibility guidelines.

How to get help

Do you need help creating or improving your lecture slides? Reach out to the educational advisors at your faculty or contact Teaching Support for 1-on-1 guidance.

References

  • Mayer, R. E. (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology) (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.