“>Here I started preparing for my first lecture and describing my experiences. Now that the lecture is over, I have a few more things to share about the whole process.
In the end, I think I spent 20 hours preparing (not 30 as I estimated previously). At some point I felt I was satisfied with my story and I didn’t feel I could change anything until actually trying it out. In terms of the “how to”, I found a teaching course on Blackboard, and looked through the first teaching lesson. There are some useful tips there on keeping the attention level of the students high, and on structuring the lecture, such as providing summaries. With this in mind, I revised my slides one final time, for a total of around 30 slides for each 45 minute lecture.
During the lecture, a few things went differently than I originally planned. For instance, I included short summary/overview slides for transitions between different topics. However, every time I felt that I already explained this twice, so I did not put too much emphasis on it. In the end, it turns out that I should have done it anyway, against my intuition :). For other slides, I realized that I could have explained something in a different way, or linked the topic more to something students are already familiar with. I received some helpful tips about this from my supervisor, so I hope I can apply these in the future.
Another thing that didn’t go exactly as planned was the timing. I am very happy that I was using the presenter mode in Powerpoint where you can see the time and your notes on the laptop screen. I was too involved with the lecture to actually look at my notes, but the time was very helpful. I realized that I started too quickly, so later on in the lecture I tried to go a little bit slower. In the end, both lectures were finished in under 45 minutes.
Overall, I think the lecture was quite a nice experience! I was not too nervous about it, and although there were some silences (such as after a “Are there any questions about this”?), there was also student participation after some of my other questions and examples. That was very nice, especially because students started thinking of how to apply the method to their own PhD research. And that’s what the course is all about!