Slides, Storyboards, RealBooks

For a while now, my lessons have come with three objects instead of one: the slides, a storyboard and a Real Book. Each does a different job, and this post explains which. The first complete set is the one for The Hydrology of Soil, Lausanne version, which I am using for the soil lesson at the University of Lausanne (UNIL). The same scheme is used for the series Statistical physics of soil water.

The slides

The slides are what you see in the classroom, and they carry the story: one idea per slide, a figure or an equation, a few words. On their own they are deliberately incomplete. A slide shows the result of a derivation, not the derivation; it names an assumption, but does not discuss it. The colours of the boxes follow a code that is the same in all my recent decks:

• blue for definitions and facts;
• orange for consequences, assumptions and caveats;
• green for what is new and for pointers forward;
• red for open problems and corrections.

The PDFs are on OSF. Editable versions, PowerPoint files with real text boxes and LaTeX equations that open in Keynote or PowerPoint, are available on request.

The storyboard

The storyboard is the script of the deck. It is a table with one row per slide and five columns:

• the slide number;
• the spoken text, a suggested narration;
• what is on the screen;
• the speaker notes;
• the mounting comments for whoever edits a recording: which build slides were merged, where a figure comes from, what was corrected.

Storyboards were born with the soil MOOC we produced for the EU project EDVANCE, where every episode had to be recorded and edited. I kept them because they answer the question a student asks when looking at a slide alone: what was he saying here? They are also the place where the changes between versions of a deck are listed. Each storyboard now ends with a bibliography in three parts: the sections of Freeze and Cherry's Groundwater (1979, openly available) to read with that deck, the works cited on the slides, and further reading.

The Real Book

The name comes from jazz. The Real Book is the collection of lead sheets that musicians actually play from: the melody and the chords, written out, no frills. My Real Books are the same for a lesson: every step, written out. Where a slide shows a result, the Real Book derives it. It also does the following:

• keeps track of units, the most frequent source of error in this subject;
• gives orders of magnitude;
• states which hypotheses are being used, and where they fail;
• lists the corrections to earlier versions of the slides (every deck has had its share of sign errors and missing factors).

The text uses the same colour code as the slides: Mathematics, Physics, Result and Correction boxes, plus Numbers boxes in the statistical-physics series. Each section starts by saying which slides it covers, and every Real Book opens with a table that maps each slide to the section where it is discussed. You can follow the lesson with the slides and open the Real Book only where a step is not obvious. Or you can read the Real Book from start to end, as a short textbook chapter.

How to use the three together

The three objects are meant to be used together:

• In class, the slides.
• To review a lesson, or to study it without having attended, the slides together with the storyboard.
• To understand where an equation comes from, or to check it, the Real Book.
• To go further, the bibliography at the end of the storyboard.

What they can serve

Beyond my own lessons, the three objects are meant to be reused.

• Students can study a topic without having attended. They can check a derivation step by step and find the one or two readings that matter. The exercises at the end of each Real Book, with answers, help prepare for an exam.
• Teachers can take a deck, or part of it, for their own course. They can cut it, reorder it or translate it, keeping the Real Book as the reference text behind the slides. The mapping from slides to sections makes it easy to see what is lost when slides are removed.
• Anyone recording a lesson or a MOOC has, in the storyboard, the script and the editing instructions ready.
• Researchers and reviewers have, in the Real Book, a place where every equation can be checked. Corrections are listed openly instead of being silently fixed.
• Translators and adapters work from the LaTeX and editable sources rather than retyping from a PDF. This also includes adapting the material to another audience, for instance a shorter lesson for practitioners or a longer one for a doctoral school.

Since the Real Books and storyboards are written in LaTeX, they are easy to keep under version control and to update together with the slides.

Everything is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0), except the paintings on the covers, which are copyrighted by the original authors and used according a FAIR use agreement. The materials are a work in progress, and will be improved after the lesson. If you find an error, a missing step or a better reference, please tell me: that is exactly what the Correction boxes are for.