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Tips for Distance Education Presentation Slides:
The 'journey' of the presentation 
The instructor develops a plan for the presentation and generates slide files. The instructor uploads the slides source files to http://netlab.gmu.edu/ or http://disted1.ite.gmu.edu in one of the following formats:
- PowerPoint (versions through 2003)
- LaTeX, with a .ps copy and optional (zipped) .eps figures
- PDF
- PostScript
Instructors should upload their slides by (at least) the day before class so support has time to convert them and so students have time to print handouts.
Support staff from netlab or IT&E (according to server) run conversion software to generate slides for the whiteboard and handouts for printing (in 1-, 2-, and 3-per-page formats). Support staff checks and uploads the whiteboard slides and handouts to the Distance education server. Support may attempt minimal editing for slide quality.
Students (and instructor) may download and print the handouts.
At the classroom, support staff sets up the equipment, downloads the whiteboard slides to the teaching machine, and starts the NEW software for recording the session. Support delivers control to the instructor and monitors the session over the network from lab or office.
The instructor teaches, adding audio, URLs and slide annotations and screen/window captures to the recording. (Video is broadcast, but not recorded at the teaching machine.)
After the class (at the end of the day), support resequences the recording to prepend a copyright notice and uploads the recording. Support puts away the equipment and locks the podium.
After the recordings have been uploaded, students (and instructor and support) may download or stream the recordings for review.
Tips and suggestions
These are offered as suggestions and probably are nothing new.
Text
Styles Styles Styles Styles
- Limit your fonts to a reasonable number, counting separately fonts with differing combinations of attributes, such as bold, italic, color, and size.
- Use font styles consistently. Many manuals set forth a typesetting convention at the beginning to help with clarifying the context of the words, such as using Courier type for program prompts and bold type (Courier) for user inputs.
Size Size
Size Size Size
- The default Whiteboard Display area is 800 × 540 pixels. (Total with buttons: 868 × 604 × 24 BPP.)
- Your smallest font should be easy to read from the back of the classroom.
- To conserve whitespace, resize the (paragraph mark) whitespace between paragraphs to a smaller font size than the surrounding paragraphs.
- Your font sizes should be relatively easy to distinguish, or use indentation or different bullets to differentiate levels of an outline.
| Color |
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Color |
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- Choose a color scheme with font colors (shades) that contrast well and are easy to read.
- Put highlighting regions behind (not in front of) objects to be highlighted and use contrasting colors.
For TAs/beginners
- Review the NEW Quick Guide at http://netlab.gmu.edu/NEW/
- Use the topic points you put on your slides to outline and guide your presentation. Avoid including so much about each topic point that you are tempted to read your slides like a script. (Instead, write yourself notecards.)
- Use gestures appropriate for the audience size: if people are far away, maybe exaggerate motions (a little) so they can tell what you are doing, or walk into the audience part way.. If pointing to something on the screen, stop talking briefly, turn and point, then turn again to face the audience and resume speaking.
Animation
Animations are not supported through conversion from source slides to whiteboard format; however, you may make multiple still slides to use like frames in a 'flip' movie by importing the next and subsequent slides in order.
Backgrounds
Backgrounds are fine for presentation, and may be preferable to the basic white background; but, they may require extra ink/toner for printing handouts. Support may generate black and white handouts (black fonts on white background) for presentation slides with dark backgrounds rather than to attempt to change the background.
If a background makes presentation slides difficult to read due to camouflaging of the text, the support staff may perform minimal editing for readability or simply generate a B&W whiteboard slides set.
Changing themes
When transferring content from one presentation to another, be aware of the font styles and sizes defined in the Master Slide (View, Master, Slide Master). Differences in defined font sizes from one slide set to another may turn a slide of nicely-fitting text lines into smaller fonts or into larger fonts that extend beyond the bottom of the slide. (I haven't verified this, but it seems to make sense.)
Beware that text, as in text boxes, may have been changed in style or color independently of the master styles. Text so changed may not match well or may become lost in a changed-to-a-similar-color background.
More than 99 slides
If there are more than 99 slides in the presentation, the ImportNext function of the whiteboard will import slides in the order 08, 09, 100, 101, ... in perfect lexical order. To coordinate them numerically, slides numbered 100 and up will be placed in a second folder: the slides 01-99 will be in C:\Program Files\NEW\SLIDES\CS123\ in folders labeled like CS123-1-01A and CS123-1-01B. After slide 99, simply use ImportSlide (instead of ImportNext) to navigate to the first slide (#100) in the 'B' folder.
Problems with and solutions for:
Text: Color & Contrast
Font blends into background. Highlight font and change the color
  
Text: Placement
Left: Text overlaps footer, font colors are camouflaged
Right: Font colors changed, Text box moved, and the font size of the 'whitespace' was reduced between the bulleted 'interface specifier' and the 'Constraints' header.
 
Diagram objects
Diagram Objects: Highlighting
- First: A shaded textbox overlaps a bitmap image in PowerPoint.
- Second: shading removed (easiest, probably best).
- Third: White regions laid over the bitmap, but under the shading and new text boxes made.
- Fourth: screen-capture of whiteboard (conversion from 'first' example).
Diagram Objects: Conversion pixel-loss
The software tries to limit the size of the whiteboard slides, so there can be information lost for complex, detailed slides. Support may have to intervene to improve the end product.
First: screen-capture from PowerPoint.
Second: screen-capture from converted slide in whiteboard. Notice missing lines.
This seems to be a removal of every Nth row of pixels during conversion. (Netlab plans to address this problem in a new version of the software, but in the meantime support can intervene for slides that are too distorted by
- saving the PowerPoint slides as .jpg files
- (sharpening,) resizing each replacement .jpg to width × 540 with Irfanview, (sharpening,) and saving,
- and substituting the .jpg for the .pdf for each replacement needed.
This particular example is still readable, but a 'borderline' case.) Using a two-pixel-thick line on shapes might help... Upate, I 'discovered' an Irfanview feature that is displayed with the Save-as-JPG dialog box--has an adjustable quality level selector.
 
Diagram Objects: Recoloring & Highlighting
Below Left: Line Diagram blends into background.
Below Right: Lines brighter.
  
Highlight on diagram: The dark lines of the diagram appear subdued by the background and the lighter areaa highlight the diamonds.
To make the diagram clearer requires more contrast. The second version tries to maintain some contrast, but has to work against both the dark background and the light diagram lines. The third version achieves clarity and highlight by insertion of a semitransparent white rectangle behind the diagram and yellow highlight regions. I think this is the best--its mid-range brightness contrasts with the black diagram lines and the bright yellow. (The dots are simply selection grips.)
How to Recolor a Line Diagram picture object
To change the line color of a Picture object, right-click the lines of the object, choose Format Object, Picture, Recolor, and change the colors and the fills appropriately.
Embedded bitmap images have to be processed with other software.
LaTeX & Postscript
Except for a problem with .eps figures for the first set of slides for a class, which was remedied by reprocessing slides after the first figure, there are not any other problems to consider... yet. So, this person of the support team considers this to be an advanced topic--but he knows to call netlab for help!
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