Abstract:

Purpose:
Many studies have examined the effect of presentation tools on motivation, self-efficacy and the academic successes of students. The researchers focus their attention on the impact of using presentations in teaching students while there are very few works which examine the effect of students’ using different presentation applications on learning subjects. The present study attempts to close the gap. The researchers from three universities – RUDN University, Moscow, Pushkin State Russian Language Institute (PSRLI), Moscow and Perm National Research Polytechnic University (PNRPU), Perm gave their students the same assignment: to use different presentation application tools to demonstrate the results of their projects. The study aims to examine the opinion of the students about applicability of different presentation tools; their perceived and real advantages and disadvantages; their effect on students’ motivation and ability to work in teams. Another aim of the researchers is to investigate if some presentation tools can better address the needs of teaching and learning one subject compared to another (Graphic Design at RUDN University, Business English at PNRPU and Rhetoric at PSRLI).

So, the study deals with the following questions:
1. What are the advantages / disadvantage of using an application for presenting the project results?
2. How can a particular application be compared with the traditional Power Point presentation?
3. What are students’ experiences in learning through the particular application?
4. Do all applications fully satisfy the requirements of teaching a particular subject?

Approach:
For the feasibility of the study there have been decided to reduce the list of presentation tools to 6 applications: Keynote, Google Slides, Prezi, Tilda, Slides, Haiku Deck. These are presentation tools that can be used as alternatives to traditional slide making programs such as PowerPoint.
The survey would be conducted among three students’ groups in different Russian universities: third year public relations students of RUDN University and PNRPU and students of philology of PSRLI. There would be created the online questionnaire in Google Forms that consisted of 15 questions that would be divided in three topics:
1) the use of presentation software (purpose, platform (desktop, mobile, cloud), price, collaboration, offline presentation),
2) the use of multimedia options (use of templates, import of images, videos, audio content, tables, export of presentation as PDF),
3) the use of additional presentation software properties (loading speed, animation effects, hyperlinks, panoramic images, 360-degree videos). Moreover, the students would be invited to bring forward the proposals for presentation software in open-ended questions.

Anticipated outcomes:
Our anticipated results will show a strong preference for using particular presentation app for specific purpose, subject or project. It will also showcase the tools that spark students’ curiosity most of all and let them be highly involved as creators of content and learning rather than simply consumers. Furthermore, it will reveal advantages and disadvantages of presentation software, students’ functional demands except editing texts and images, ease of use, the compatibility of presentation files and the best templates’ design.

Keywords:

Online presentation software, slides, presentation design.