PowerPoint enhancements to blackboard lectures: effort led by Graham Walker My most time-consuming personal contribution to our group activities was to try an experiment I had been thinking about for years, namely adding PowerPoint enhancements to my blackboard lectures. I wanted to keep lecturing on the blackboard because that forces me to focus on the absolutely most important points, and also ensures that the students have time to make good notes of the material I am discussing. However, it also tends make the lectures seem dry to a generation of students raised on video games. I therefore used PowerPoint on a screen at the side of the lecture hall. The screen was dark much of the time but, using a remote control with a built-in laser pointer, I would then use it in a variety of ways that I felt might excite or engage the students. For example, I assembled a set of striking images - ranging from detailed protein structures to pictures of various organisms expressing green fluorescent protein - that I showed at appropriate moments. I also showed the students various animations and movies (including some spectacular ones I first saw at research meetings), which illustrated critical points. The students have often resisted my past efforts to provide a historical background to some of the key discoveries in biology, but this year seemed to respond quite differently when I showed them pictures of the people I was talking about. Also, I showed articles from current newspapers and magazine that would help the students appreciate the relevance of the material. For example, on the very day that I was going to be discussing DNA sequencing, the front page of the Boston Globe had, not only an article announcing that the sequence of the human genome had been completed, but also an article saying that the SARS virus genome had just been sequenced! Although I received a few movies and images from colleagues as personal favors for use only in my class, I gathered most of the material from the web and, within the next few months, plan to make this material freely available on our (presently under construction) HHMI Education Group web site and on the HHMI Professors web site. With the help of Melissa Kosinski-Collins and Gurukarm Khalsa, the multimedia slides are being annotated and posted on the course website.

Video Clips Along with displaying static images in lecture, Graham began showing short video clips. These clips were collected from the web, fellow researchers, and one was even created by members of his lab after seeing Jo Handelsman's guest lecture. This clip, which can be accessed by clicking on the link below, demonstrates the ice-nucleating ability of a bacteria followed by repeating the experiment with another bacteria that lacks this ability. When the movie was shown in class Graham narrated what was on the screen and asked the students to develop hypotheses for how this effect occurred. Ice Nucleation Video

Powerpoint Enhancement Resources Drawing on the conclusions made from Brian White's 2004 focus groups, in the Spring of 2005, the Powerpoint enhancement slides were each annotated by Melissa Kosinski-Collins after lecture and then posted on the web for student access by Gurukarm Khalsa. In an effort led by Julia Khodor, the students provided daily short responses on lectures and often would reference the effectiveness or problems in the Powerpoint enhancements directly. We often noticed that certain slides or movies resonated well with a particular group of students due to their own interests and talents. In addition, we had the students participate in an end-of-the-year comprehensive survey that asked various questions concerning the effectiveness of the Powerpoint enhancements. Due to copyright restrictions, we have posted the Powerpoint enhancement slides and annotations used in the Spring 2005 course, but have only included the web-link to the appropriate picture/movie/slide if applicable. In addition, we have provided a few selected student responses to individual slides or a series of slides to give a sense of how students used the pictures and images to connect biology to their own lives. Recombinant DNA 3 Recombinant DNA 2 Recombinant DNA 1 Mendelian Genetics 4 Mendelian Genetics 3 Mendelian Genetics 2 Mendelian Genetics 1 Bacterial Genetics 1 Molecular Biology 5 Molecular Biology 4 Molecular Biology 3 Molecular Biology 2 Molecular Biology 1 Biochemistry 6 Biochemistry 5 Biochemistry 4 Biochemistry 3 Biochemistry 2 Biochemistry 1

Spring 2004 Focus Groups Focus groups were held by Professor Brian White to discuss the value, pros and cons of using the Powerpoint enhancements in lecture for the students involved in the spring 2004 course. The results are summarized below. The good points: - pictures of famous living people (especially from mit): the students could picture themselves having a similar future - stepwise animations seemed to help - mitosis videos helped to picture what was going on - also to show that the cartoons we draw are 'really close to what's actually happening' and not just cartoons. The things to watch out for: - be SURE to have an explanatory caption - in case the students didn't catch the explanation - when showing data, be careful about how indirect the evidence is (for example, the slide of more colonies in a DNA-repair-deficient strain - this was strange for them, why would more mutations be better???) - just because it makes sense to the instructor doesn't mean it will make sense to the student - need to see it from their point of view. - need to be clear about what to look for - you only need a few slides of people make the point about their biographies (more is redundant) .

Spring 2005 One-Minute Responses After each lecture in the Spring 2005 class, students were asked to answer various questions like "What was most confusing point addressed in today's lecture?" or "What idea in today's lecture was most relevant to your life?" and respond in a short answer format. Scattered throughout the semester we received responses mentioning the Powerpoint Enhancement slides directly. For example: When asked "What made you interested in taking 7.014?" students responded: "The glowing green mice...I want to make my ears glow." "Seeing the interesting slides and videos the professor displayed while introducing the subject." When asked "What was the most surprising thing you learned in lecture today?" students responded: "Werner's syndrome. It was amazing to see that some people really have accelerated aging and it is not just fantasy like the movie Jack." "The Jesus lizard can run across water solely based on surface tension due to hydrogen bonding." Several additional examples are coupled with their Powerpoint enhancement sequences in the download-ready files at the bottom left of the page. Overall, the one-minute responses showed that the students enjoyed the majority of the Powerpoint enhancements, and that these feature "excited and engaged" many of them at various points throughout the semester. An overall problem, however, was that the students thought there were too many images and photos of scientists.

Spring 2005 End of Term Survey A Powerpoint enhancement-specific survey was completed by 95 of the 99 registered students at the completion of the Spring 2005 term. The students were asked to evaluate the multimedia components of Graham's lectures and to make suggestions as to what could be changed and redesigned in the upcoming year. As a whole, the class responded well to the addition of posting annotated Powerpoint enhancement slides on the web after class. Sixty-five percent of our students took advantage of this resource and reviewed the slides after lecture. Overall, most of the students felt they learned from the Powerpoint enhancement material and gathered enthusiam for biology via the multimedia materials. On a scale of 1 to 7 where a score of 7 indicated the students enjoyed the enhancements and 1 indicated the students did not enjoy the enhancements students, students rated the overall enjoyment of the enhancements at 4.56. The students were then asked to evaluate the different categories of materials, images of scientists, current event articles, movies, and biological images, individually. On a scale of 1 to 7 where a score of 7 indicated the students enjoyed the enhancements and 1 indicated the students did not enjoy the enhancements, the following averages were obtained: Images of scientists: 4.02 Movies of biological processess: 5.25 Biological still images: 4.76 Current event articles: 4.64 On a scale of 1 to 7 where a score of 7 indicated there were too many enhancements and 1 indicated there were too few enhancements, the following averages were obtained: Images of scientists: 4.95 Movies of biological processess: 3.87 Biological still images: 4.31 Current event articles: 3.97 We also asked the students to rate the most memorable multimedia slide from each category. Many students recalled images of Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin. Most remembered current event articles on the STEM cell debate in Massachusetts and AIDS research. Most noteably, however, almost all students were able to recall video of a macrophage chasing a bacterium, a gecko climbing up walls using van der Waals interactions, and DNA division during mitosis. Ultimately, the results indicate that the students would prefer fewer images of scientists and they found the movies of biological processes the most stimulating and memorable of all the material. The majority of the students feel Graham should modify his current enhancements, but continue to use multimedia in the class next year.