Workshop - Rethinking the design of presentation slides

This workshop challenges the traditional design of presentation slides. Consisting of a phrase headline supported by a bullet list, the traditional design often appears in classroom and research presentations. In place of the traditional design, this workshop calls for a new design that consists of a succinct sentence headline supported by visual evidence. A pilot study has revealed that students understand and remember significantly more when the instructor relies on this new design as opposed to the traditional design. Using a template that follows the new design, workshop participants create a small set of teaching or research slides. Following that in the workshop is a peer-critique of these slides. In the past three years, this workshop has been well received at several distinguished agencies and institutions: the Environmental Protection Agency, Los Alamos National Laboratory, United Technologies, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Oslo, and Virginia Tech.