AI can help you unearth the story in your lectures
Be honest: how much of your prep time goes into making sense? And how much gets lost to slide formatting and layout tweaks?
Think about when your prep usually happens. Is it wedged between a pile of marking and a string of meetings at the end of a long day? In that state, trying to think simultaneously about the story you want to tell and how it should look creates a brutal kind of cognitive overload.
These are two different modes of work: shaping the story and shaping the slides. Try to do both at once, and you get the worst of both worlds: messy visuals and a thin narrative.
The peacock’s tail in the lecture hall
We often downplay aesthetics as window dressing. We tell ourselves that if the content is good, the look should not matter. But that’s a mistake, and biology gives us a useful way to see why.
In evolutionary biology, there’s the Handicap Principle. Think of a peacock’s tail. It’s heavy, it increases vulnerability, and it takes serious energy to maintain. It is not directly useful for survival. And that’s exactly the point. It is a costly signal that says: I’m so fit, and my environment is so stable, that I can afford this display.
In your classroom, visual storytelling can function in a similar way. When your materials are clean, coherent and story-led, you are not being fancy. You are signalling confidence. You are telling students: I know this well enough to make it easy to follow.
We are teaching digital natives. They consume high-quality content on YouTube and Instagram daily. Against that backdrop, cluttered or inconsistent materials do not just look old school. They cost you attention and trust. Clean, story-led visuals earn both. They signal: I know this well enough to make it easy to follow.
Decide what your job actually is
The first thing you need to do is be ruthless about where you focus. Ask yourself: Is my value in typing, or is it in communicating the meaning and storytelling? Experiment with using artificial intelligence (AI) tools as your narrative repository before you ever touch a slide.
Upload your existing materials, such as notes, PDFs and past lectures, into NotebookLM. Use it as your personal library. Play around with the settings and features, and see what it finds. NotebookLM can help you find patterns, themes and a throughline that were already hidden in your own work. My personal favourite is the mind map tool in NotebookLM, as it helps to illuminate connections I might have missed and provides a good basis for grouping ideas into a coherent narrative.
Take that narrative over to ChatGPT. This is where you play. Use prompting to hunt for related ideas you haven’t considered yet. Keep what works, toss what doesn’t. Generate a detailed lecture outline based on that refined story arc. Experiment.
- Why is no one listening?
- The lecture is dead, long live the lecture
- Relieve student boredom by ‘activating’ lectures
Move from thinking to creating
Once your narrative is clear, the real hurdle is the transition to a story-led presentation. To break the cycle of “typing slides into existence”, I started using Gamma, which helped me remove formatting from the centre of my thinking. Take your new lecture outline and upload it to Gamma.
With Gamma, you can see how a whole narrative unfolds on screen without the friction of manually creating slides from scratch. You can condense text, re-express lists as diagrams and smart layouts, and reshape ideas into visual formats that support your storytelling rather than overwhelm it. Crucially, these changes remain editable at every stage, allowing you to refine tone, emphasis and pacing while keeping total control of the story.
You can still export to a PDF or PowerPoint file if you need one, but once you’ve experienced a workflow that prioritises thinking time, it becomes difficult to go back to tools that demand your attention be spent on formatting.
One underrated advantage of this workflow is the baseline narrative clarity and design integrity.
Keep AI on a human-controlled spectrum
A human-centred approach to AI means retaining full control over the narrative. Sometimes you may choose to lean heavily on AI support. At other times, you may choose to use none. Most of the time, you will sit somewhere in between, but it will be your choice.
That flexibility matters. It allows you to align AI use with your learning outcomes, values and comfort level. You can confidently say that the work is yours because the decisions that shape meaning remain yours.
Used thoughtfully, AI tools make academic expertise more visible to our students by clarifying our storytelling. There is a difference between an AI-generated lecture and a human-led lecture that uses AI well. Try it yourself.
Irina Gokh is an associate professor at De Montfort University.
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