One of my sabbatical projects is converting an “in-person” course that the department hasn’t offered lately into an online course. As I was working on this, I was trying to decide the best way to present the actual course content. The course itself will be offered via Blackboard (see my earlier post on that topic); but how do online “lectures” work? I am not usually a PowerPoint-oriented person – I am much better at talking about material than I am at turning it into a pretty presentation – and I also believe that if you’re going to put every word onto a PowerPoint then why bother? Just assign reading in the textbook and leave it at that.

So, how can I turn my usual way of presenting material into something that works online? This is where Adobe Presenter comes into play. It’s a plugin for PowerPoint. Basically you put a normal sort of PowerPoint presentation together (so for me that means key points, illustrations, things like that – more of an outline than anything else) and then, using a nifty headset with built-in microphone, you record a voiceover. You advance the slides as if you were in a lecture hall – you can use all the cool animations, etc. that you want – and you talk about it, again just as if you were in a lecture hall. You can record over and over again, individual slides or the entire thing, and then when you’re happy with it, you “publish” it. The whole thing winds up as a Shockwave file, and lives on the UMB media server. You immediately get a URL for the presentation, which can then be put into Blackboard as a web link (or put on any other web page, or emailed to anyone that you want to show it to).

When the student clicks on the web link, they see the presentation and hear the audio at the same time. They can pause the presentation (perhaps you’ve put a link into a slide and you want them to go off and look at that before coming back to the presentation), they can replay any particular slide, they can jump ahead, they can watch it over and over again. There is also a “notes” tab, so if you wrote anything in the “notes” section of the PowerPoint, the student can read it. Very useful for making your presentation accessible to hearing-impaired students!

I’ve done three presentations so far, and have (I think) seven or eight more to go for a complete course. Another nice thing about this method is that it will be very easy to run the course again. If I decide I want to re-record something, or modify one of the presentations, I can – but if I’m happy with them they way they are, I just put the links into the new course and there you have it.

So, Adobe Presenter is a deceptively powerful tool for online teaching. It has lots of other cool features that I haven’t really explored yet – for instance, there is a quiz tool that lets you embed quiz questions right into the PowerPoint. You can also put animations into the PowerPoint and they will work beautifully in the final presentation (I have only used this once, but it looks great). There is a certain learning curve associated with it, but it wasn’t a steep one, so if you’re doing anything with online learning, whether a blended course or a fully online one, you might consider checking out Adobe Presenter.