Engaging a large cohort of students with teaching content is a difficult task for any educator working in higher education. When students are not receiving feedback about their participation efforts, this can lead to decreased engagement. Polling activities, such as hands up responses, can be used to address this but students cannot respond…

The PowerPoint-assisted lecture (slide-lecture) is a common lecturing approach in higher education, in spite of much criticism of its use. Its popularity is facilitated by its affordances for multimodal instructional design, e.g. text with images and speech. Little is known about the integration of different semiotic modalities within the…

This article explores how 145 photographs collected from 20 PowerPoint lectures in undergraduate psychology at 16 UK universities were integrated with lecturers' speech. Little is currently known about how lecturers refer to the distinct types of photographs included in their presentations. Findings show that only 48 photographs (33%) included in…

Lectures prevail as a ubiquitous teaching and learning method across universities worldwide. Whereas lectures have been conceptualized from language-centred perspectives, lectures' materiality as linked to their socio-cultural and historical meanings have been scarcely explored. To address this gap, we tackle the materiality of communication in…

This article is concerned with student engagement and understanding in large group teaching in Higher Education (HE). Specifically, it is concerned with the application of Multimedia Learning (MML) methods in Politics, History, International Relations, Sociology, Social Work, and Business and Economics teaching that privilege the use of images to…

In higher education, supporting students with special educational needs (SEN) necessitates an understanding of these needs, additional teaching aids and innovative ideas. The teacher must be an integral part of this support process, and this is difficult for the majority of teachers, due to their lack of core understanding of SEN. However,…

Student boredom within the school system has been widely studied and shown to be linked to various negative consequences such as diminished academic achievement, school dissatisfaction and truancy. However, little attention has been given to the issue of boredom within higher education and the current study aims to redress this balance. Two…