If you ask most university educators what the most time consuming aspect of their job is, you will probably get the answer of ‘teaching prep’. I’ve certainly worked into the small hours many a time trying to perfect my lecture slides. I’ve created so many really high quality slide decks, including carefully thought out animations and annotations. I’ve searched for diagrams to use with my students, failed to find one I really like, and then spent hours creating a slightly different one, hacking the built in shapes to create lovely diagrams that are just the way I want them.

And do you know what I did along the way? I totally lost any sense of what my students were learning in the session. It had all become about me presenting information, not about what students were doing with that information.

Our job as educators is not to make beautiful PowerPoint slides. Certainly, no one is going to promote you for having beautiful PowerPoint slides. We are educators, not graphic designers. Our job is to help our students achieve the defined learning outcomes or competencies. The amount of time spent on making PowerPoint slide decks within HE is phenomenal, and I would argue out of all proportion. Yes students should have access to high quality accessible teaching resources, but that doesn’t mean that all individual academics should be spending countless hours creating new slide decks for every session.

How much content is actually needed for 1 hour of teaching?

Let’s work through this a little. 45 minutes of a content driven lecture will require ~20 slides. Let’s assume 30 minutes to prepare each slide from scratch – that’s 1 hours of effort for 45 minutes of teaching. And if students barely engage with the content, this is looking like a really inefficient use of time. How much better would it be to spend at least some of that time with a really well focussed discussion question? 5 minutes to prepare, and 15 minutes of students actively engaged in the material. I’m not saying that all active learning can be as efficient as this, but I don’t hear this preparation efficiency argument nearly enough in discussions of active learning.

Most people I know massively over prepare for teaching sessions. My primary piece of advice to new lecturers is throw away half the content they have prepared. Yes really. Half. We cram far too much into every hour of teaching, leaving our students overwhelmed and overloaded, and ourselves drowning in the amount of teaching prep. We have to stop doing this to ourselves!

When I was starting to write research presentations I was given guidance of present approx one slide per minute. A quick Google search suggests this advice is common. Even for a research talk, this is a very high density of information. To properly talk through a slide with graphs, diagrams or tables can take several minutes. Presenters who try to rattle through a slide per minute typically lose their audience, or gloss over the most interesting aspects of their research, which can be pretty frustrating to sit through.

But a lecture is not a research talk. When presenting to an expert audience you can go at a pretty fast pace, but when presenting to students who are not experts you need to slow right down. Even 10 slides in a didactic 1 hour lecture only gives 5-6 minutes per slide, which seems reasonable to me if those slides have detailed or technical content. And that still leaves no time for answering questions, discussion or other activities that actively engage students in their learning. Viewed in this way, a deck of 30-40 slides per lecture starts to look really excessive. If you really need students to take in that much information, can you direct them towards a textbook chapter or review article instead, and spend your time discussing the content.

Personally, I find that the topics I know the most about are the ones I teach the worst. I find myself tempted to include all the nice examples I know, all my favourite research findings, all the interesting bits of history of that field. You can’t possibly condense years of living and breathing a particular topic into a 50 minute lecture. And I hate to break it to you – it is likely that most of your students don’t actually care about everything that you care about. Yes a lecture should include context and interesting snippets of information that you wouldn’t get from the text book, but we all try to cram far too much in, particularly for our personal favourite topics.

How much time is reasonable to allocate to teaching prep?

Over-preparation also has important implications for academic workload, which we all know is far too high to the detriment of academic mental health. Formal institutional workload models typically allocate a certain number of preparation hours to each teaching hour. There is usually a slightly more generous allocation to new teaching. For example, a model might allocate 2 hours prep for each hour of teaching. Many colleagues I know consider these allocations to be vastly unrepresentative of how much time it actually takes to prepare their teaching, and therefore lose all faith in the workload model process.

I’m not a massive fan of these workload models either, but I think there may be some wisdom in them. I have swung my prep around to much more closely match the models. If the institution is giving me 2 hours to prep a session, then I will prepare the best session I can within that 2 hours. Doing anything else is either (I) committing yourself to doing unpaid overtime, or (ii) cutting into time for research and scholarship, which we all know is the path to career advancement. As a busy working mother to two children I’m increasingly ruthless about working in the evenings or weekends, and finding time to publish is essential. So if a session gets 2 hours for prep, it gets 2 hours.

But those two hours are going to be spent focussing on creating the best learning experience for my students, even if it looks a bit rough around the edges. I will focus on structure, active learning, sign posting to resources and interacting with my students, but not on alignment of text or fancy animations. I will spend time making sure the accessibility of my resources is up to standard, but not on making them beautiful or super polished.

What alternatives to PowerPoint do I use?

Realistically, you do need something to structure a teaching session around. A PowerPoint presentation is pretty good for clearly presenting the essential information, and for uploading to the VLE as a resource. But it isn’t the only option. We almost automatically open PowerPoint when starting to prepare, but there are other choices.

I actually prepare all my teaching in Mentimeter, not PowerPoint. Even if I’m not including any interactive components. Menti is *much* better at PowerPoint at creating accessible presentations, eg through forcing you to use alt text, clearly tagging content as headers, organising the content logically so those using screen readers can interact. Menti also forces you to adopt a non-cluttered layout, and I find it super quick to populate with content. Even if you don’t have an institutional license the free version will take you a long way.

I always bring plain paper, marker pens and whiteboard pens to a teaching session, and often use a digital OHP or the whiteboard to draw diagrams live in the session. Again – this is a lot more efficient than faffing creating beautfil slides. I also find drawing diagrams live in a class allows for responding to student questions and extra annotations if needed. I’ll take a photo of the board and upload it to the VLE if needed. A tablet and stylus could also do the job digitally if you want to hook up to the projector. The important thing is starting with the blank piece of paper, or perhaps a skeleton diagram that you populate live.

I might also record a video of content to watch before or after the class, and for this I use nothing more complicated than a single take video of me drawing annotated diagrams onto a blank sheet of paper (see my YouTube channel for examples). What would take me hours to recreate in PowerPoint diagrams I can record as a single take in ~20 minutes. And to be honest, I think the hand drawn videos are better than a fancy narrated PowerPoint. I always felt best teaching was at the whiteboard, and I wanted to recreate that spontaneity in my videos. There is something about the rawness of them, and the fact that nothing gets drawn without being explained, so the pacing is much better. I also won’t record a video unless I can imagine it being used for multiple purposes, or at least be used for multiple years. I host my videos on YouTube so they get a secondary audience as well as my immediate students, so the impact and reach of those resources is much greater.

Sometimes I will produce a worksheet and print that off. Old school right?! I know that many institutions discourage paper teaching resources, but sometimes it is the right thing to do pedagogically. I have been known to have that argument with colleagues in accounts or sustainability. And let’s not forget that digital resources are not sustainable either – they all rely on servers which consume electricity, and may be cooled by vast amounts of water. If I need my students to annotate a diagram or complete a table in class, sometimes the digital alternative is far too clunky and nothing substitutes for a printed version.

Sometimes I will ask students to bring their devices into class and ask them to access resources that way rather than on a central large screen. For example if a class focuses on a particular research paper, it is impractical to display that on the central screen. I’m always mindful of inclusion here, and will bring some printed copies, or structure a session so students work in small groups so at least one person has a device available.

Stop making beautiful PowerPoints!

I’ll come back to where I started. Our job as educators is not to make beautiful PowerPoint slides, and doing so is a phenomenally inefficient way of preparing teaching. Our job is to help our students learn and meet the requirements of their course. I’m not saying get rid of slide decks entirely – there is a place for them, and it would not be inclusive to get rid of high quality visual aids. But we don’t need to be so reliant on high end PowerPoint slides all the time. They can actively distract us from what our students are learning. Focus on what students are doing with the information, and how your teaching session helps them to achieve their learning outcomes. Then choose the most appropriate format for that. It might be a slightly scrappy PowerPoint, or it might be something else entirely. Since I made the decision to ditch PowerPoint wherever possible, I haven’t looked back. I therefore encourage you to free yourselves from all of that time and effort, and create resources that emphasise learning, not graphic design.