Distributing Teaching Presentations

Last updated: 09 June 2010
Published in: Managing your digital resources
Tags: delivery | e-learning | powerpoint | presentations | teaching

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Summary

This document looks at the ways teaching presentations can be distributed to their end users. While there is a choice of presentation programs, Microsoft PowerPoint is the dominant application and will therefore be the main tool covered in this paper.

The screen presentation is an almost essential element of any teaching and learning session. Slides are used to support, contradict, illustrate or generate debate during a presentation. Printed versions of the slides are often also handed to the attendees to assist in note taking during the presentation and for future recall. A digital version of the slides may be made available to those who were unable to attend the original presentation or to refresh the memories of those that did.

Digital delivery methods

There are a variety of ways that presentations can be distributed digitally. The most commonly used method within education is to upload the presentation to a virtual learning environment (VLE) in its original format, it can then be downloaded and viewed on any computer with the parent application installed. Microsoft produces a free PowerPoint Viewer for users who do not have access to the full application, alternatively it should be possible to open the document in an open source application such as Open Office. A VLE can be configured to release teaching materials at a defined time, this ensures that the material is viewed when appropriate and in the correct context within a structured course.

Recently Microsoft Office has offered new versions of its familiar formats for example .PPTX rather than .PPT, however these can only be viewed or edited with the most recent versions of the applications. It is therefore recommended that files that are to be distributed are saved in the more familiar versions of the format (.doc, .ppt).

Apple Macintosh produces its own presentation application called Keynote which has many enthusiastic users, the native Keynote files however cannot be read by PowerPoint and at the time of writing there isn’t a free viewer for PC users. While Keynote can export a presentation as a PowerPoint (PPT) file, the file may not retain all of the animations and visual effects commonly seen in a Keynote presentation.  

With the increasing popularity and flexibility of web-based tools, more and more files are being created and stored online. Google members can use the Google Docs tools to create and store their presentations online - these can then be presented directly via the internet or exported to their desktop as a standard format such as .PPT. Presentations created in Office, OpenOffice, Google Docs or Apple’s Keynote can be uploaded and distributed from sites such as SlideShare. Most online delivery systems offer the choice of full public access or limited access to invited users only - however, unlike a VLE, online hosted presentations cannot be released at predefined times. You can find more information on online delivery of presentations in our document Using SlideShare to Share Presentations.

Presentation slides can also be converted into the widely supported Acrobat (.PDF) format. While the slides will lose their original transitions, they can be password protected to control access to the content.

Another solution to distributing the slides in their original state is to capture them along with a recording of the presenter’s voice and any other relevant media as a time-based AV presentation commonly referred to as a screencast. The screencast video can then be stored online for web delivery. A good quality screencast of a presentation should, for the audience, be close to the original experience. See also our advice document Screencasting: Broadcasting On-screen Activity.

It is important to ensure that in making the presentation more widely available the user is not breaching the copyright of the material (including the text) within the presentation.

Last updated: 09 June 2010
Published in: Managing your digital resources
Tags: delivery | e-learning | powerpoint | presentations | teaching

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