PPTs that load ASAP and easy to see!

Everyone at one point or another has been locked in a dimly lit room while someone read from a screen...eh I mean used PowerPoint to enhance the super interactive and highly motivational presentation right? If you haven’t, then consider yourself lucky! At the very least I’m sure that you have read one of the many articles floating around about how America suffers from PowerPoint poisoning.

I’m not going to get on my soap box and talk about whether PowerPoint is wrong or right. I think that each instructor must make that call for themselves and their students. What I do want to talk about is what you can do with the PowerPoint presentation that you created for your face-to-face class that you are now thinking about using with your online class. The easiest way would be to log into your institutions CMS and upload that gangly .ppt file. In a perfect world this is great. Your students have access 24/7 and there are no excuses. Right?

Let’s take a look at this question from a couple of different angles. The first issue I see is that there is an assumption being made. The instructor assumes that all students in her class have a working copy of Microsoft’s PowerPoint installed on their computer. I can assure you that much to Mr. Gates’ dismay, not everyone owns a copy of this digital slice of Americana.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project just under 50% of adults have access to a high speed Internet or Broadband connection at home. If a PowerPoint file is chock full of media goodness, there is still a good chance in America that about 50% of your participants may not be able to download it, or they may have to wait a significant amount of time to download content that is considered critical to successful completion of a course.

This entire argument boils down to accessibility. However, this time it’s not accessibility in terms of those with cognitive or psychomotor skill handicaps. It’s about a failure to address the technological lowest common denominator. When this happens both the instructor and the student fail.

Fixing this is actually very easy. Many may already have the tools necessary to bring PowerPoint files to the asynchronous world. I know that there are several ways to overcome this limitation. The process I am describing is only one. Please don’t dismiss me if my way is not your way. Come to think of it, if you already have a way, then I have to ask; why are you reading this?

On the Macintosh side, the Mac OSX operating system has roots in PDF when it comes to rendering on screen fonts. Because PDF is so tightly integrated in the operating system, it is as easy as issuing the print command from the “File” pull-down menu in PowerPoint (or any other application for that matter) and then clicking the button labeled “ PDF”. Then, select “Save as PDF”. That’s it, no other software or file massaging is necessary. Choosing to save a PDF through the print command, we have all the options for creating a PDF as we would have if we were printing the document. For instance, before saving as a PDF, we could choose to PDF the .ppt file in 3up view, or notes view. It is entirely up to you.

While we are talking about the Macintosh, I think it is important that we address this same process with Keynote. Apple’s version of PowerPoint. Turning a Keynote file into a PDF is even easier. All one needs to do is choose to export the file. When the export dialog box appears choose PDF file, and you are on your way.

I don’t claim to be as familiar with the PC side of things. However, I do know that there are a number of freely downloadable applications that will do the same thing that I have described above. At the bottom of this article, I will include a couple of links to some of these sites. The latest incarnation of the Microsoft Windows Operating system may even have PDF writing capabilities built in.

If you are lucky, or flush with cash, you could purchase Adobe’s Acrobat standard, or Adobe’s Acrobat Professional. This would allow you to create PDFs with varying degrees of other functionality. At the time this article was written, the price for each version is $99 and $159 respectively.

Regardless of what platform the PowerPoint started on, The newly created PDF will be cross platform, be smaller in file size; meaning less bandwidth is needed to download, and the only application the end user needs is a free downloadable application called Adobe Acrobat Reader. Simply take your newly created PDF files and upload them to your institution’s CMS and voila. It’s a win-win situation, and most importantly, it helps the learner.


Useful Links:

http://www.pewinternet.org/

http://www.primopdf.com/

http://www.dopdf.com/

http://www.adobe.com/

Please stay subscribed for more features on both asynchronous and synchronous practices in education and how they directly affect the learner.