Making the transition from paper-based content to online content offers many advantages to instructors and students. Other than the cost saving, online access is convenient for both faculty and students. To ensure you maximize the advantage of convenience, the format that you use to provide these documents to your students is an important consideration with respect to ease of use as well as using best practice in teaching.

Providing material online without the benefit of your verbal explanation of its content could do students a disservice. Presentation slides are a good example of this since a properly constructed presentation should contain only your key points. See http://disted.camosun.bc.ca/DE/fac/tutorials/powerpoint.php for more information about why not to post your PowerPoint files online for students. The most compelling reason why instructors put their PowerPoint slides online is that their students asked them to. Generally, students want the slides for the following reasons:

1. They can print them before class to use as a note-taking guide.
2. They can use them as a topical study guide letting them know what points they need to cover.
3. They miss class for a valid reason or they plan to skip class hoping that they will get what they missed from the slides.

In the first and second case, you can save the slides as a PDF with three slides to the page with space for notes on the right. This file will be considerably smaller and makes it clear to the students that not all the information is here, so they need to come to class. If you are concerned that posting your presentation slides either before or after the class will cause students to skip your class, then you may want to consider what value-added activities you can provide in class that would motivate your students to attend your class.

PowerPoint 3 slides per page for note taking

In the third instance, you can plan ahead to make your slide show a comprehensive information package, which would include an audio or video recording of the presentation, or in the very least include your detailed talking notes. This will be a very large file which some students may have trouble downloading. Consider using a better-suited tool to meet the objective. See options for this in the link above.

Poor Presentation Slide with too much information

If you are using presentation software to organize your lesson plan or lecture with all the details that you will cover in class, please do not inflict these wordy presentation slides on students in a lecture. Students can read your slides more quickly than you can speak them (if they can see the small font). As a result, they won’t be listening to you as they read your slides and copy them word for word in their notes. Although students who miss a class will appreciate having you post this detailed material, that is not a good reason to produce a poor quality presentation.

Here are some online resources that discuss creating good PowerPoint presentations:

• http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/skills/presentations.aspx
• http://desktoppub.about.com/od/microsoft/bb/powerpointrules.htm
• http://www.iasted.org/conferences/formatting/presentations-tips.ppt

With so many students using mobile technology such as smart phones, tablet, and notebook computers, downloading large files can be expensive, time consuming, and sometimes not possible due to restrictions on some networks. To improve ease-of-use for your students consider using a variety of file compression techniques to reduce size of files. Here are a few tips:

1. When you convert most files to a PDF format, the file is compressed to a smaller size file. Compare your original file size to the compressed one to make sure it is smaller. Converting to PDF (Portable Document Format) has the added advantage that the file can be read on all computer platforms and requires only a PDF viewer, which is free.
2. Other file types such as .doc or .docx, .xls or xlsx, or other proprietary formats can pose similar problems for students whose computers can’t read a specific file format. It is important to check with your students to make sure the format that you intent to use will work for them. An excellent alternative to PDF is using HTML files.
3. HTML files are quite small, easy to download, and can be kept up to date easily when you need to correct errors or add more information. Students can read HTML files using any computer and most mobile devices. If you are using D2L, making changes to your files requires only that you log on, find the file to edit and save it. There is no requirement to open the file on your computer, make the changes and then upload the file to the server as would be required if you were using .DOC or .PDF file.
4. If you include images in your HTML files also consider the size of the file before you use it on your content. If your image is more than 500K consider making is smaller. Photo editing programs such as Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Gimp and Picassa will compress your image with just a few clicks. Picassa and GIMP are Open Source programs that you can download to your computer free of charge. If you don’t have admin rights to install the programs on your computer, ask IT support to install it for you.
5. There are also free online services that will let you upload and image, and the compressed file made available for you to download to your computer.
6. Be sure to consider copyright implications of using these services by reading the service’s terms of use.

Being aware of the choices that you make regarding the file types you use will improve learning in your course and make for a better online educational experience.