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When designing slides for a class I am teaching, I like to derive inspiration from slides others have given before me. However, it is difficult to find concrete examples of such slides outside of a typical Google search. Can you give me examples of slides you or your colleagues have given for entire classes?

James Rohal
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    What sort of presentations? Do you mean slides for teaching class, or slides for giving talks? – Jim Belk Mar 18 '14 at 02:43
  • Teaching. I will edit the question to reflect that. – James Rohal Mar 18 '14 at 02:44
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    This question now has three votes to close. I'm not saying I disagree, but it may be helpful if one of the voters could explain their reasoning in a comment. – Jim Belk Mar 18 '14 at 05:10
  • Maybe you should change to title to indicate that you are interested in this for yourself as an educater and not for showcases for your students in order to give them advise. – Markus Klein Mar 18 '14 at 06:33
  • There is a rather sleepy and in my opinion badly named Area 51 proposal where this would be fit. – Wrzlprmft Mar 18 '14 at 08:46
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    I have no idea why this question was closed. In my opinion, specific examples of good practice are far more valuable than generalised discussion. I would love to see a collection of examples that people consider to be good. Community wiki would be appropriate of course. I have voted to reopen. – Neil Strickland Mar 22 '14 at 07:17
  • I agree with @NeilStrickland. This seems like a reasonable question to me, especially if the focus is on explaining what makes good slides good. – Jim Belk Mar 22 '14 at 17:37
  • I added a sample answer. Hopefully this gives a little more direction. – James Rohal Mar 22 '14 at 17:42
  • I cast the last vote to reopen. This became a lot clearer via edits; to collect more things like the example answer seems a reasonable idea. – quid Mar 22 '14 at 17:51
  • I think it is difficult to provide examples of good presentations online because it doesn't depend strictly on the slides used. It will depend on the way the presentation is delivered. I can imagine a case where one professor delivers an excellent presentation and another delivers an awful presentation but both use the same slides. – mkasberg Mar 23 '14 at 16:11
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    I agree with you, @mkasberg. I feel that the answers should include an explanation on how to deliver the presentation properly, or provide the actual lecture (via YouTube for instance). – James Rohal Mar 23 '14 at 16:32
  • Two things are putting me off answering here. One is the word "good" in the title: I'm not sure if any of my slides qualify. The other is the level of detail in the sample answer: I'm not sure I have time to write such an answer. – Andrew Stacey Mar 24 '14 at 13:08
  • How about this idea, @AndrewStacey? I will create two answers. One being a community wiki and the other being my sample answer. The community wiki will be a collection of links to slides, grouped by subject. Answers outside of the community wiki can give authors more space to explain their presentation if they so desire. I can change the title and body to reflect that this is a showcase of presentations. – James Rohal Mar 24 '14 at 16:07

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I am happy to share my Beamer slides, available through each course webpage at my homepage. The courses that have slides are:

  • Combinatorics: A course in enumeration, including simple counting, combinatorial proofs, bijective combinatorics, and generating functions. The page also has information about the structure of the course project involving individual research and poster presentation. (Example set of notes)
  • Graph Theory: Basic graph theory, graph statistics and properties, coloring, planarity, graph algorithms. There is a course project where students research and write about mathematicians. (Example set of notes)
  • Mathematical Modeling: The focus is on the modeling process from start to finish. Students learn to use Mathematica and apply it to function fitting, probabilistic models, queuing theory, and linear optimization. The course project is a group research project where students take some real world situation and try to understand it mathematically. (Example set of notes)
  • Multivariable Calculus: Parametric and Polar curves, including area and arc length. Vectors, vector functions, functions of multiple variables, gradients, multiple integrals. These notes are the most newly created (as of 2014), so they have a more advanced use of color and graphics. In this example I use color to explain the chain rule and include graphics about the directional derivative.

Slides are broken down by lecture and are intended to encourage active learning by leaving out certain details and examples that will be worked out on the board. Students download the notes before class and bring them to class on paper or on their electronic devices.

Wrzlprmft
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Christopher Hanusa
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Below is a list of slides assembled by the community, organized by subject area.

Algebra and Combinatorics

Analysis, Geometry, and Topology

Mathematical Biology

Mathematical Physics

Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Optimization and Control

Ordinary Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems

Partial Differential Equations

(Pre)Calculus

Probability, Stochastic Processes, and Financial Mathematics

Symbolic Computation

James Rohal
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Material for all my courses is at http://neil-strickland.staff.shef.ac.uk/courses/. For the following courses, there are complete sets of lecture slides:

  • Methods for differential equations: I will be teaching this in Nanjing starting next week, so there are various bits of Chinese in the slides. There are a large number of diagrams, often with some kind of animation. Separate from the slides, there are also web pages with interactive animations of phase portraits.
  • Mathematics IV (Electrical): This is basically vector calculus for electrical engineers. Again, there are many diagrams, often with some kind of animation. Separate from the slides, there are also web pages with three-dimensional diagrams that can be rotated by mouse.
  • Linear mathematics for applications: In this case, only the handout version of the slides is currently on the web. Various bits of these handouts have been blanked out and replaced with light green patches. The students were encouraged to work out for themselves what should go in those patches, or failing that, fill them in during the lecture. Some of my colleagues have been using that system for a while, but last semester was the first time I tried it. I am not sure how successful it was.
Neil Strickland
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