Don't use decorative fonts that are unreadable. Use a simple sans or sans-serif font such as Calibri or Tahoma. Although they may seem "boring", they are effective and easy on the eyes. Let's leave decorative fonts for the kids.

When choosing colours for your slides keep accessibility in mind. We want learners that are colour blind to still able to clearly understand what is going on in the slides. Colour blindness means that learners will see colours at a decreased quality or won't be able to tell some colours apart. The popular form of colour blindness, is the inability to distinguish between red and green. This means you should avoid relying  solely on colour coding to distinguish between elements. To help learners along, try using bold fonts and patterns as a secondary way of identifying differences. Here is an example of a slideshare presentation by Laura Czerniewics and Sukaina Walji on the Mystery of MOOCs. You can see that both red and green appears the same to colour blind learners, but the main element in focus has a thicker border and is bolded. Try using Vischeck to test how colour-blind learners will view your images and webpages.



We also need to make sure that the colours we choose just works. This example of a blue background with red text is very hard on the eyes. Your eyes are hurting already hey?

Try this tool by WebAIM to check the accessibility of colour contrast if you are unsure your colours work. 

Do not drown your learner with paragraphs on your slides. Keep text concise and to the point. 

A good slide has a heading and body font that is readable. I would keep the side heading font between 36pt and 44pt.


For body font I recommend 26pt to 34pt.

When designing your slides keep in mind that subtitles is likely to take one or two lines at the bottom. Ideally you should keep this space blank or avoid putting important information at the bottom.

With widescreens becoming the new standard, the ratio for slides his moving away from 4:3 to 16;9. For MOOC platforms such as Futurelearn and Coursera, they require 16:9 for their videos. If you're using Powerpoint 2013, 16:9 is the default ratio for your slides. It is easy to convert your slides, but be weary that your images may become stretched. In this example, you'll see black borders on the first image, this is because I'm viewing my 4:3 slides on a widscreen. I converted my presentation to 16:9 and you'll see it automatically makes my text and image bigger, but the image appears to be stretched.

As more people access learning materials from their phone, we have to keep those who watch MOOC videos from their phones. While it's difficult to make slides 100% readable for smartphones, make sure important points are big enough to see on a smartphone. I decided to test the same slideshare example from earlier on my Samsung S4. We can see that some of the slides are still readable at this size, which is great.