The Active Class

Recently a blog post by Brant Choate went viral. It was passed, posted, cited, sent, tweeted and retweeted across the web. The provocative title, “Teachers: 10 Reasons Students are Tuning You Out,” proved impossible for curious professors to resist. Perhaps especially for those of us concerned with what feels like a crisis in student engagement.

In the top three reasons why students tune out, is a predictable rant about how professors use presentation slides: ”You read directly from your Powerpoints…that are copied from the textbook anyways. You don’t save your students any time by going to class. Let’s face it, most students are out to get the information that will be on the tests in the quickest way possible.”

At the base of this complaint is an issue with redundancy of information design and delivery. This is not time-saving, per se, though certainly these two factors are closely connected. Choate, representing sentiments common to the GenY cohort, expresses the frustration felt when anyone is trapped in a presentation where slide after plodding slide presents information that is easily Googled or Wikipediaed. Likewise, anyone reading this has had the misfortune of witnessing a presenter who uses the slides as talking points—reading directly from the screen with agonizing slowness. Professors do this everyday and our students follow by example.  How many classes ask students to sit through endless hours (weeks?) of group, peer-to-peer, template-designed, wikipedia-bullet-pointed, clip-arted presentations that do more to zap the energy out of the class, introducing frustration and encouraging backchanneling, rather than inciting engaged interest?

This same controversy came up last year when an administrator at Southern Methodist University made headlines with his mandate that professors lecture without e-slides, encouraging them to “teach naked.” The reason? Students were complaining bitterly about being bored by bad slide use. Furthermore, British researchers at The University of Central Lancashire found that when students have to consciously tune out to avoid death by PowerPoint, the outcome is educational technology interfering with student performance.

Of course, we don’t have to “teach naked” in order to engage students using Keynote or PowerPoint. Obviously teachers who feel that electronic slide presentations are tools that add value must learn to use them effectively. In other words, we need widescale innovation in e-slide design and delivery. Easy to say, but how would that work exactly? Here is a tip you might use to revamp and retrofit your (and your students’) use of electronic slide decks, with a goal of increasing student engagement, information comprehension and retention.

Consider the Ignite Presentation Style. Want to supercharge part of the lecture, or your student presentations? The Ignite presentation style gained major attention during “Ignite week” in March. Here’s how it works: a maximum of 20 slides, each set to autoadvance after 15 seconds, such that the total preso is 5 minutes long. There are many sites out there touting the effectiveness of this method, and others offering presentation and design tips, and many video examples of Ignite style presentations are online.

Pedagogically, in my experience this style of lecturing energizes the class like almost nothing else. The key? Design that relies on visual learning rather than text-heavy slides. Carefully selected beautiful high-res images will add a “wow” factor to the presentation. These slides provide the backdrop for a carefully rehearsed lecture accompaniment that gets right to the point in five minutes flat. During the presentations, the Facebooking, Blackberrying, and texting is less likely to happen, because the content is terrifically interesting, visually appealing, and perhaps most importantly, fleeting.

Afterward? Discussion will flow like nobody’s business, because (a) the students’ curiosity will have been peaked, and (b) the presenter (whether prof or peer) will be eager and able to elaborate on what those present think is most relevant. Since it’s a challenge to fit everything into the strict 5 minute time frame, this rapid “sampling” approach sets the class up for engaged discussion of all the tasty bits that couldn’t fit. Ignite presentations work effectively to whet the appetite of those present. Examples of Ignite presos by my students are on slideshare here by @PaisleyYasmine, and here by @SteveKeating (what’s missing on these slideshare examples is the audio, so here is a 2.5 minute example of mine with voice-over-slides).

The top two FAQs include: “Where do we find cool photos?” In response I send presenters to flickr and give a quick lesson on what “creative commons licenses” are, if need be. Second question: “How can I say anything of value in five minutes?” In response I usually agree that it is indeed more difficult to design and communicate high-impact, intriguing, informative information—whether in the form of an Ignite presentation deck or a Twitter 140-character microblog. However in our attention economy, brevity is increasingly powerful. The Ignite approach helps hone exactly that skill, and well as, others including information design, writing for public speaking, and conceptual thinking (linking ideas to images).

Innovating with a tried-and-true technological tool such as PowerPoint can inject energy into our classrooms. Fast-paced? Certainly. Leveraging visual pleasures, even verging on edutainment? Undoubtedly. Configured for millennial students who are attuned to multichannel multitasking? Exactly.

image by Night Owl City on Flickr