School of Materials Science and Engineering
Breeze Presentation® is a valuable tool for distance education. This article is a summary of my thoughts and experience using this tool in a distance version of CME 210 Introduction to Materials Science, which is basically a descriptive lecture course on the science and engineering of materials. The course contains some mathematics, but nothing that would be considered advanced or abstract. As such this is an ideal course to present as a distance education course.
Breeze presentation allowed me to prepare and distribute narrated and animated lectures on the Web. However, the medium requires some rethinking of the method and organization of lectures. Presenting a "film" of a lecture is technically possible; however, that solution is not advised because vast amounts of computer and communications resources are required to distribute that type of presentation. Instead, lectures tend to be based on a narrated slide show genre. (The program does allow a still picture of the lecturer to be displayed during playback of the lecture.)
A difficulty with the slide show method is that the student's attention is difficult to hold for any length of time. Therefore, I have found that dividing lectures up into small 5 to 10 minute segments or "lecturettes" is an effective way of presenting the material. Segments much longer than 15 minutes tend to become ponderous and difficult to view.
A second challenge using the slide show method is that the narration has to be very high quality. The narration must be scripted as hesitation and repetition in the narration are exacerbated by the medium. My experience was that 10 minutes of lecture required a minimum of 3 hours preparation time.
To prepare a lecture, I start with the material I want to cover. Generally, I only try to make a maximum of four major points per segment. I then design and produce the slides for the segment. In the narrative I usually spend between 30 seconds to one minute per slide, so a segment contains about 10 slides. The next step is to produce the slides in PowerPoint®. I then print the slides and write the narrative for each slide. At this point I return to PowerPoint to add and sequence any animations for the individual slides. When I am satisfied with the slides and script, I use a Breeze Presentation plug-in for PowerPoint, and narrate and time the animations for the lecture. The software allows reworking of narrations of individual slides. Once I am satisfied with a lecture, I compile the lecture using the server Clemson set up for that purpose. At this point, the lecture is ready for publication, and I publish it to Blackboard®.
Since I have an office computer equipped with a document scanner, a sound card and a microphone, I am able to do all my lecture preparation in my office. If technical assistance is required and for some faculty who struggle with a lack of equipment, a well-equipped and staffed faculty laboratory is available in B102 Barre Hall.
While creating lectures for distance education seems to be a daunting task, it is not impossible, and in my opinion is worthwhile for courses that can be presented multiple times. Breeze Presentation is a tool that enables the instructor to create and publish high-quality distance education lectures.