<< Didactics & teaching methods

Design & Develop

Need support?

Get in touch with us! We are happy to help.

More contact details

Create lecture slides

This page provides some tips and tricks you can apply in creating and designing your lecture slides. It covers tips and tricks based on Mayer’s multimedia principles, but also offers an accessibility perspective.

Why creating clear lecture slides is useful

By applying these tips and tricks, you can ensure your slide deck is supporting the story you are trying to get across, and contributes to all students’ learning experience. 

Tips & tricks

Multimedia principles

Mayer’s Principle

Activity

Coherence

Simplify your slides.

E.g. in adding visual elements, do they support learning or comprehension?

 

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

  • Consider visually impaired students.
    • Avoid green and red/pink, as these colours are difficult for those who have colour vision deficiencies (colour blindness).
    • Check your slides and images in “black and white” to see whether these are readable vision impairments such as colour blindness.
  • Test the contrast in your slides.
    • Use sufficient contrast levels between background and text.
    • Don’t use a white slide with black text, use a soft/ pale background with a dark blue text.
  • Use proper spacing and alignment.
    • Left align the content, without justification.
    • Line spacing should be proportional to inter-word spacing as larger line and word spacing improves readability.
    • 1.5/150% is preferable.
  • Create readable text.
    • Use letter case text in your presentations to increase readability.
    • Avoid text in uppercase/capital letters and small capital letters, which can be less familiar to the reader and harder to read.
  • Use Arial for better readability.
    • The font Arial is sans serif font and is easier to read.
    • Make slides as visual (non-verbal) as possible, so students don’t have to divide their attention over your story and the content on the slides.
    • Use visuals that support your story.

Relevant resources

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.