Lecture Design and Delivery

How to design and deliver lectures

Below you will find some practical advice for younger researchers with limited or no lecturing experience on how to get started designing their own lectures and plan how to deliver them. This text is primarily aimed at lectures that are to be given to undergraduate students within the natural sciences and draws on my own experience lecturing topics covering microbiology, biochemistry, biotechnology and bioinformatics.

Typically, your first lecturing experience will see you being “parachuted” in to give a single lecture session of just one or two hours within a larger course where you have little idea of who the students are, what they know or what the other lectures in the course will cover. This is unfortunately the academic standard (at least in the natural sciences) and will not let you develop effectively as a lecturer or teacher unless you acquire responsibility for more lectures. By far the best way to develop as lecturer is to give the same lecture (perhaps with some tweaks) more than once per year.

Starting to plan your lecture

The basic rule for preparing any oral presentation is to consider your audience. You will find that giving a lecture to undergraduate students is very different from presenting at a conference or seminar precisely because your audience will be fundamentally different. In an educational setting, your audience might be a lot more hostile(!) and also lack a lot of basic knowledge that prevent them from efficiently grasping what it is you are trying to communicate.

If it is your first time teaching within a particular course, it is strongly recommended that you try to find out who the students are that you will be lecturing to, what program they are studying and at what stage (year) are they. Will your lecture cover a key topic within their educational program or does it concern a more fundamental aspect? A lecture on enzyme kinetics will look very different if it is intended for students taking a biotechnology program versus students taking an environmental science program.

A good lecture takes time to design so be sure to start your preparations well ahead of time. You may for instance need to read up on certain aspects of your assigned topic that you are less familiar with. Another key fact to establish from the beginning is whether the contents of your lecture will part of some form of examination such as a written exam.  

One thing to keep in mind is that if you deviate significantly in structure and/or content from a previous incarnation of your assigned lecture, this can affect previous students who have yet to complete assignments or redo exams that include your lecture topic. Therefore, make sure that any assignments or exam questions relating to your lecture should also be possible to answer based on the contents of the previous version of your lecture.

Consult student evaluations from previous years to see whether your assigned lecture topic has been either praised or criticized. If the lecture has received praise from previous students then your predecessor was obviously on to something and you should carefully consult his or her lecture slides for inspiration. You can even try and interview the person to try and get some practical advice on how to present the material in an engaging way. If on the other hand the lecture has been panned by previous student groups, keep an eye out for specific comments in the student evaluations that can give you an idea of what it was that did not work to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

There are many ways that one topic can be presented in the form of a lecture. My advice is to try and come up with your own mental outline of what the lecture should look like before you consult a textbook or someone else’s lecture slides from the web or elsewhere. If you are “inheriting” a lecture from another person, I recommend that you do not look at their lecture slides until you have a rough outline what you imagine the structure of your lecture should be. Once you have a rough outline, you can compare it with other sources such as the course textbook or someone else’s lecture slides. Were there important points you did not include? You can also consult with the course leader about what topics your lecture should include. Another useful thing to do is to consult the lecture slides of other lectures within the same course to see what they cover so that you avoid going over the same material again but also making sure that there are no knowledge gaps that would prevent your audience from understanding the contents of your own lecture.

What about using generative AI to design whole presentations in an instant? Preparing a well-structured presentation is a skill that you develop through practice. If you decide to use generative AI to do the work for you, you are denying yourself an opportunity to practice. There is also no guarantee that the lecture slides designed by an AI will the “optimal” way to present the lecture topic to your particular audience. In addition, there is always a risk that the AI will “hallucinate” and generate material that is incorrect or flat out false. One thing you could do once you have a near-final draft of the presentation that you yourself designed is to subsequently have the AI generate a presentation that you then can compare your presentation to. But my current standpoint is that generative AI is best avoided.

Designing and organizing lecture slides

Once you have a rough idea of the scope and structure of your lecture, it is time to actually start making slides. The number of slides per lecture depends entirely on how much time you intend to spend on each slide. In general, you should avoid cramming too much stuff within each of slide. How much text should you include in a slide? My own rule-of-thumb is never more than six full sentences in a single slide – and preferably much less than that. If a slide starts getting too wordy, try splitting it into two separate slides.

I should note that there are different schools of thought whether you should have any text on your lecture slides at all. I prefer to include text on my lecture slides to ensure that everything that the students have to know in order to pass the course is there in plain writing and I do not risk forgetting something. If there is less text on the lecture slides and more information is communicated verbally only, it will mean that students have to take more notes, which can interfere with following the actual lecture contents as you are presenting. Too much text on the other hand can overwhelm the students and they are caught trying to read the text and listen to the lecturer at the same time, which means they will miss a lot of potentially important information. I always advice my students to read through the lecture slides at least once before the lecture so that they have a rough idea of what we are going to cover. Another benefit of including text on lecture slides is that students with reading difficulties can plug the text into a speech synthesis program.

It is always recommended that you start your lecture with an overview of the topics. It is also good to end your lecture with a summary of the main points. You can even include some study questions at the end of the slides that the students can use to review the lecture material in their own time. One tip is to use color-coding schemes to label different sections of your lecture so that your audience knows which section a particular slide belongs to so that they know the context of the slide content. You can also include a list of suggested further reading at the end of the presentation that the students are free to consult as the choose. Alternatively, you can insert links to relevant source material on selected slides within the presentation provided that that the slides do not become too crowded.

One thing you need to consider is what the key points or concepts of your lecture are. What proportion of the total lecture time should be allocated to each point and in which order should they be presented? How do you “travel”/get from one point the next? It also helps the students if you clearly indicate in your slides what information is essential (and will be part of the examinations) versus what information is non-essential but still relevant and useful to know. It is ok to also include “fun facts” as long as you clearly indicate that they will not be part of the examination. In general, you should constantly ask yourself whether a particular piece of information is relevant for your intended audience, since the temptation is often to include too much information.

I recommend using images whenever possible – not just to explain certain concepts but also to make the lecture slides more attractive. One tip is to always keep an eye for images that you can use in your lectures when you are reading research articles and other academic texts. One trick I use a lot is to borrow any nice-looking vector graphics images (e.g. SVG-format) from published papers and modify these images in graphics software like Adobe Illustrator and then include them in my lectures. (Just make sure to credit the source: “Adapted from…”)

Although images are useful devices for communicating information, you should be careful to not use too much imagery within a single slide that could end up confusing the students. If you have a complicated diagram, try to present it in increments. One benefit with using PowerPoint and other presentation software is that you can create a series of slides to work as a simple animation so that the students can follow each step in sequence both during the lecture but also when they are reviewing the lecture contents afterwards.

Preparing to give the lecture

Once you have a set of lecture slides that you are reasonably happy with, it is time to start thinking about how to deliver the lecture. The first thing you need to establish is how long it takes to actually give the lecture. One obvious but fool-proof way to make sure you do not run over time is to do a practice round to see how long it takes you to give the lecture. Just make sure that you include a buffer for questions that the students might have during the lecture in case something is unclear to them.

There are probably as many lecturing styles as there are lecturers and it can take time for you to arrive at yours. I recommend that you think back and try to remember really good or really bad lectures you yourself have attended during your own studies and try to articulate what it was that made a lecture really good (things to emulate) or really bad (things to avoid), respectively. Another very simple way to get some inspiration is to sit in on lectures given by your co-workers.

There are some general dos and don’ts, however. I recommend starting the lecture by introducing yourself to the audience if you have not encountered this particular group of students before. It is ok to bring lecture notes. To avoid getting lost during your lecture but never speak directly from your notes. Also never ask students to read a block of text by themselves unless they are meant to provide an opinion on the text afterwards. Address the whole room, not just the students in the first row. Try to make brief eye contact with students during your presentation. Bring physical props if they are relevant to the lecture topic – but not too many so that the students get distracted while. passing objects to each other so that they cannot follow the presentation.

Questions to and from students

One recommendation is to always look for places in your lecture where you can ask the students questions and make them engage actively with material. A good place for a question is when you have just stated something that requires a short explanation founded in knowledge that the students should have already acquired – or they should be able to at least make an educated guess. So rather than providing the explanation, you instead ask the students to attempt to explain what you have just described. Ideally you should be able to ask a question every 5–6 slides. Another way to use questions to activate students is to quiz them when technical terms from earlier in the lecture (or from previous lectures) show up in the slides. If your lecture session includes one or more breaks, you can also quiz the student on the main points from the previous section after each break.

A related issue is how you choose to deal with questions from students during the lecture. You should always try make little pauses each time you move from one topic to another to give the students a chance to ask questions about the material you just covered. What about students interrupting the lecturer to ask a question? I feel this is up to each lecturer to decide what their own “policy” is – as long as students are allowed some channel of asking questions during the lecture, for example by evenly spaced question sessions.

I personally encourage my students to interrupt me if there is some new material that they do not understand. Keep in mind that it can be very intimidating for a student to interrupt a lecturer to ask a question, especially if there is a large audience. I always try to make the students feel welcome to ask question and praise them for asking me to clarify fundamental concepts since there are probably more students in the audience who have the same question but feel too shy to actually ask. One specific scenario where it is very useful to allow the students to interrupt you at any point is if you have made a mistake in the presentation, for example written a negative value instead of a positive value or accidentally left out the word “not” in a sentence.

If a question comes up about something that has been covered in a previous lecture given by you or another lecturer that may or may not be directly relevant to what you are presenting at the moment, it is entirely appropriate to offer to address that question after the end of the lecture since you have a restricted time budget for each lecture topic. But do not be dismissive, encourage the student to “hang on to that question” until the next break or the end of the lecture.

Additional advice

Students will tend to engage more actively with your lecture material if they perceive that is relevant to their subjective learning goals, e.g. the profession they have in mind once they complete their degree. However, the relevance of the material might not always be obvious to the student until years later and it might therefore help if you make the relevance explicit: this is why you should care about what I am about to tell you? (One example from my own teaching: When I lecture on the biochemistry of the respiratory chain to students taking programs in crop science and environmental science, I bring up that many fungicides work by inhibiting the respiratory chain.) 

Some final practical advice:

1. Make sure you have a potential stand-in in mind if you happen to get sick or get stuck in traffic on your way to campus. You should also consider how you would be able give the lecture remotely via Zoom or other software platform should you get sick and substitute teachers are in short supply.

2. Some theoretical concepts can be very particular with regards to choice of words so it might be a good idea to emphasize this every time it comes up, for example “If this shows up as a question on the exam, make sure that you…”

3. Always make notes directly after the lecture to record what sections that students seemed to struggle with so that you know what you might need to update or restructure prior to giving the lecture next time.

Good luck!