The document outlines best practices for curating educational content, focusing on copyright, file types, and the creation of a style guide. It discusses good, bad, and ugly aspects of design, emphasizing consistency, accessibility, and avoiding clutter in presentations. Key design elements include text alignment, font usage, and color choices to enhance readability and user experience.

1. Course Content Considerations

2. Outline
• Curating Content
• Common File Types
• Creating a Style Guide

3. CURATING CONTENT

4. Overview
• Copyright & Content
• Using Creative Commons Licences
• Usage Standards

7. OER
• Open educational resources (OER) are
freely accessible, openly licensed text,
media, and other digital assets that are
useful for teaching, learning, & assessing
as well as for research purposes

15. FILE TYPES

17. File Types
• Types of files
• How to provide files to students

22. Style Guide
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(or common design standards)

23. The GoodThe Good

24. Consistent Functionality
• Opening Links
• Opening Documents

25. Familiarity & Consistency
• Same Design Elements
– Font
– Headings
– Line Height

26. Look & Feel
• Is there continuity?
– Colour Scheme
– Boarders
– Images

27. Optimization
• What about the low bandwidth student
– Pictures as .jpg
– Audio as .mp3
– Video as .mp4

28. Accessibility
• Have you considered all students
– Visually impaired
– Hard of hearing

29. The BadThe Bad
Six typographic errors.

30. It is tempting to try squeeze as much as possible within the margins of
the page. When we wanted to save paper, this might have been an
understandable practice. You wanted to communicate as much as
possible within limited amount of wasted paper. We need to remember
that full pages of text are hard work on the eyes and this makes it much
more difficult to comprehend. Although you may want to make as much
of the space available, you also should avoid “squeezing the margin” and
trying to fit in too much. It could be helpful to look at adverts and see how
they have made use of white space.
White Space

31. “A little text and a lot of white
space gives a classic and
elegant look.”
White Space

32. – Do you want your text left, centre, or right justified.
• Choose one alignment and stick with it!
Keep text and graphics away from the edges of the screen.
Keep an eye out for
vertical alignment (top,
middle, or bottom).
Choose a font that is larger than 18.
Alignment

33. Alignment
Alignment is very important so that the user can
scan and read text easily. Left aligned text is what
most people are used to and you don’t want to
frustrate readers comprehension

34. Bullets
• Although • spaghetti • westerns • are
• full • of • bullets • your • presentation
• should • NOT • fire • too • many
• rounds.

35. Bullets
• Start with a verb or noun
• Focus on key words
• Reduce sentences to phrases
• Remeber 6 6 6

36. Fonts
• Using too many fonts causes the
presentation to look cluttered and sloppy.
• Use a maximum of two fonts, preferably
a combination of serif and sans serif

37. Fonts
• Serif fonts have little tails on the letters;
• Sans serif fonts do not.

38. Case
CAPITALS ARE USUALLY USED TO
EMPHAISE A POINT.
AN AUDIENCE MEMBER WILL
USUALLY PAUSE WHEN THEY SEE
CAPITAL LETTERS.

39. Case
Use UPPER and lower case letter for readability

40. Over suppply
In many presentations there is too much writing. The presenter thinks that it is
important that every word gets seen by his/her audience. Or sometimes the
presenter used the presentation as a place to dump notes.
While it might be tempting to think that your viewer hanging on each of your
words, it’s more likely that they have become glazed over (much like you are
feeling now) and are suffering from cognitive load and can’t really take all the
information in.
Sometimes the presenter might even try to reduce the font size to ensure that everything fits in. But this
does not work, because the excess of text has already caused him/her to loose an audience and now the
audience can’t see what he/she has written.

41. Simple presentation & language
• Hast thou e’er been irritated whilst a comrade spaketh in
o’erbearing tongues that soared right over thine pate

42. Simple presentation & language
Have you ever been annoyed to hear your
friend speak in language that was far too
formal for the setting?

43. Remember
“Less is more”
Mies van der Rohe

44. The Ugly
Six yucky things to do in a
presentation

45. Colour Choices
Poor colour choices can make it
extremely difficult to read your slides.
In a light room, use a dark background
In a dark room, use a white background

46. Fuzzy Edges
Colour Combinations
Vibrate
RED BROWN BLUE

47. Too many…
• graphics

48. Too many…
• animations

49. Too many…
• Slide transitions

50. Too many…
• Slide transitions and

51. Too many…
• Slide transitions and
inappropriate sounds

52. Silly pointless text effects will not
enhance your presentation.
Typewriter text

53. Summary: Curating Content
• Copyright
• Creative Commons

54. Summary: Common File Types
• Images
• Multimedia
• Written content

55. Summary: Good, Bad & Ugly
• Style guide
– Good Practice
– Typography
– Visuals

56. The End
By Derek Moore