Conception
This week I created a lecture on Skin Cancer. Well, after about ten minutes of thinking this was hastily redefined to Non-melanoma skin cancers (essentially BCC and SCC). All skin cancers would be WAY too much. The first point is to be realistic in what you want to teach. Too much content and people will switch off…
Next, I like to broadly draft out the sections I wish to cover, or that I think are most relevant. For this I usually divide an A4-page into four. Then you can begin to fill each section. Once you have this overall plan you’re good to go.
Content creation
Things are a little easier for us at pulsenotes. We usually start with one of our presentation templates. We have all been teaching for many years and have a wealth of graphics and assets to fall back on. Our program of choice is Apple Keynote - yes, you guessed it we’re all massive Mac fanboys (including Norton, who reluctantly surrendered his windows laptop in our fourth year of med school).
Diagrams are BY FAR the most time-consuming part of content creation. Thankfully, I am not alone in this endeavour; both myself and Sam are now relatively proficient in both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop - however, a good diagram still can take upwards of 5 hours to produce. But as they say, a really nice vector diagram is worth a thousand words.