Keep it short - focus on one concept and limit yourself to 10 minutes and 5 slides.

Information rich content is more easily digested and cognized when presented in smaller pieces, particularly when presented online. "TED Talks" for example are never longer than 18 minutes. Trying to cram too much into a single presentation leads to confusion and reduced memory retention.

Don't think about the presentation in terms of a single one hour lecture. Instead, break down weekly topics into key concepts or messages and produce a 5-10 minute presentation for each. This might involve producing 2 or 3 mini-presentations that can be integrated throughout the learnonline study guide for each topic.

Above all, stay focused on your message and be guided by the TED philosophy - say a lot with a little.

Keep it simple - don't use animations, multi-colours, weird fonts, or clip art.

Using clip art, animations, transitions, colourful templates or non-standard fonts does not make your presentation any more interesting. Let’s be honest, you’ll find it better use of your time to focus on the substance of your narrative.

Most of us can remember great keynotes not because of the speaker's use of wacky fonts and clipart, but because they found a new and provocative way to engage you in an idea.

Don't be afraid of empty space on your slides - in all areas of visual design, empty or 'white' space is an important element in framing and pulling focus on your content. Plonking a cartoony clip art character in the corner of a slide is just a distraction.

It's better to risk being a little boring with your slides than being irrelevant, disorienting, or confusing. If you feel the need to compensate for a dull presentation with splurges of creativity, see Rule 3.

Plan and write a script - don’t 'wing it', and never read your slides.

A live lecture provides affordances to ad lib, use presenter notes and take queues from text on your slides. In a live setting your audience is more forgiving, and with prior rehearsal you may even exceed audience expectations.

There are a different set of expectations for recorded online presentations– your audience is looking for polish, and for you to lead them through an explanation in the most efficient and articulate way possible, free of “ums”, “ahs” and silent patches.

Even for the most confident speakers, planning your presentation and writing a script will give you the opportunity to review your narrative and polish it, just like you do with most other work you produce (hopefully).

Think creatively when planning your script. Does your script merely reel off factual statements that may just as well have been read from Wikipedia? Or do you challenge or provoke your audience with a compelling narrative, clever analogy or provocative focus question that engages them with your message?

A script will help you to avoid adding too much text to your slides and relying on your slide content as a script. There is nothing more annoying than listening to a presenter read slide text verbatim, or seeing a slide crammed with lines of text.

And importantly, providing your written script to students gives hearing impaired students equal access to your presentations and allows students to review the material at their own pace, which is particularly useful for ESL students.

Include a call to action - how should students apply the knowledge?

You’ve followed all the steps so far, produced a great presentation and even got your students mulling over a provocative focus question in their mind. Don’t leave them hanging!

You have a small window in which their newly discovered knowledge will be retained in memory. If this knowledge can be applied straight away with higher-order thinking, it will likely be remembered longer and in a more meaningful way - "learned", not simply remembered.

There are many ways to engage students in follow-up action. For example, presentations could conclude with a short quiz, lead into a group discussion, a reflective summation, concept mapping task, or any number of other activity types. Consider integrating your presentation into a learning task in your studyguide narrative.

Make it Web accessible - use iSpring Pro.

Now that you’ve taken the time to produce a quality presentation, don’t just dump the PowerPoint file into your course site. By nature of its large file size and inability to be viewed in most Web browsers, PowerPoint is not suited for Web delivery, but there are tools that will make it so.

iSpring Pro, a PowerPoint plug-in, is licensed by the University and will convert your presentation into Flash and/or HTML5 (iPad friendly) that will package your presentation into easily accessible streaming files for fast downloading and viewing online. Presentations can be embedded right into a learnonline page that will help create a contextual setting around it.

Recording a voice narration is easy with iSpring, as you do it slide-by-slide, which means you can go back and re-record any individual slides without having to record the whole presentation all over again.