How to Cite a Lecture or PowerPoint in APA 7
APA 7th edition does not have one lecture template. An unrecorded class talk is a personal communication. Slides or a recording your classmates can open on Canvas are a classroom source. A public SlideShare deck is a visual work with a site name and URL. This page follows the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (2020), §§8.8, 8.9, and 10.14, the Common Reference Examples Guide last updated 3 March 2026, the Creating an APA Style reference list guide (23 February 2022), and the Style Center wording reprinted by Alamo Colleges for PowerPoint slides and personal communications. It is the APA lecture and slide guide, not the YouTube, conference presentation, syllabus or course pack, or personal-communications tutorial.
By CitationEasy Editorial Team16 min read
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Quick Answer: How to Cite a Lecture in APA
Ask who can recover the same words. If nobody outside the room can hear the talk again, cite the instructor in the text only as a personal communication and skip the reference list. If the class can open the file on the learning management system, write a full reference that names the LMS and ends with the login page, not the deep link behind the password. If anyone with the URL can open the slides, name the public site and give that URL. In every recoverable case, italicize the presentation title in sentence case and put the format in square brackets.
Official APA 7 lecture and slide samples (not invented templates)
Unrecorded lecture, narrative (APA Style):
E.-M. Paradis (personal communication, August 8, 2019)
Unrecorded lecture, parenthetical (APA Style):
(T. Nguyen, personal communication, February 24, 2020)
LMS PowerPoint the class can open (Common Reference Examples, §10.14):
Mack, R., & Spake, G. (2018). Citing open source images and formatting references for presentations [PowerPoint slides]. Canvas@FNU. https://fnu.onelogin.com/login
Public PowerPoint (APA Style Center / Alamo reprint):
Jones, J. (2016, March 23). Guided reading: Making the most of it [PowerPoint slides]. SlideShare. https://www.slideshare.net/hellojenjones/guided-reading-making-the-most-of-it
Untitled lecture notes online (Publication Manual p. 347):
Canan, E., & Vasilev, J. (2019, May 22). [Lecture notes on resource allocation]. Department of Management Control and Information Systems, University of Chile. https://uchilefau.academia.edu/ElseZCanan
Parenthetical citation for a recoverable deck:
(Mack & Spake, 2018)
Narrative citation for a recoverable deck:
Mack and Spake (2018)
The old habit of pasting a Canvas file URL into the reference, or of building a reference list entry for a talk nobody recorded, is the failure this page is written to stop. APA 7 splits the job by recoverability, not by whether the content felt scholarly. The Creating an APA Style reference list guide states the list exception in one sentence:
APA Style, Creating an APA Style reference list guide (23 February 2022)
An exception is personal communications, which are cited in the text of your paper but are not included in the reference list (see Section 8.9 in the seventh edition Publication Manual).
The recoverability test
APA Style treats a lecture as a citation problem only after you know whether a reader can retrieve it. The Style Center personal-communications page, reprinted by Alamo Colleges, puts unrecorded classroom lectures in the same set as emails and live speeches. Royal Roads WriteAnswers restates the classroom-or-intranet cutoff for Moodle recordings and intranet reports: cite the file as a recoverable work only when your actual readers can open it.
APA Style on unrecorded lectures (Publication Manual §8.9, Alamo reprint)
Works that cannot be recovered by readers are cited in the text as personal communications. Personal communications include emails, text messages, online chats or direct messages, personal interviews, telephone conversations, live speeches, nonarchived social media livestreams (e.g., Instagram Live, Twitter Spaces), unrecorded webinars, unrecorded classroom lectures, memos, letters, messages from nonarchived discussion groups or online bulletin boards, and so on.
Use a personal communication citation only when a recoverable source is not available. For example, if you learned about a topic via a classroom lecture, it would be preferable to cite the research on which the instructor based the lecture. However, if the lecture contained original content not published elsewhere, cite the lecture as a personal communication.
Because readers cannot retrieve the information in personal communications, personal communications are not included in the reference list; they are cited in the text only. Give the initial(s) and surname of the communicator, and provide as exact a date as possible, using the following formats:
That second sentence is the preference students skip. If the instructor walked through a published article, cite the article. Use the lecture citation only for original wording, data, or framing that does not exist in a recoverable source. The secondary-source page covers the rare case where you cannot get the original.
| What you used | Can a reader recover it? | What APA 7 wants |
|---|---|---|
| Live class lecture, no recording, no posted slides | No | In-text personal communication only. No reference list entry. Publication Manual §8.9 |
| PowerPoint or recorded lecture on Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, or Sakai, written for that class | Yes, by the instructor and classmates | Full reference. Name the LMS. End with the login or home page. §8.8 and §10.14 (Mack and Spake, Common Reference Examples, 3 March 2026) |
| Same LMS file, but the paper is for a journal, thesis committee, or any reader who cannot log in | No, for that audience | Treat it as a personal communication, or cite a public version if one exists |
| Slides anyone can open (SlideShare, a public course site) | Yes | Full reference. Site name plus the public URL. §10.14 (Jones, 2016) |
| Untitled lecture notes posted online | Yes | No italic title. Put a description such as Lecture notes on topic in square brackets, then the department and university (Canan and Vasilev, 2019) |
| Public YouTube or TED recording of a talk | Yes | Cite it as a video, not as a class lecture. Use the YouTube guide |
| Archived public webinar | Yes | Cite it as a webinar. Lee, McAdoo, and Denneny (2023) in the Common Reference Examples Guide is the official pattern |
| Conference talk, poster, or symposium | Yes, as a meeting contribution | Cite it as a conference presentation. Use the conference guide |
Unrecorded classroom lectures
A talk you heard in the room, on Zoom with no archive, or in a webinar that was never saved, has no source element a reader can follow. APA 7 therefore keeps it out of the reference list. Give initials plus surname, the words personal communication, and as exact a date as you have.
Official APA Style personal-communication forms (Alamo reprint of §8.9)
Narrative citation (APA Style):
E.-M. Paradis (personal communication, August 8, 2019)
Parenthetical citation (APA Style):
(T. Nguyen, personal communication, February 24, 2020)
Do not invent a title, course number, or institution line to make an unrecorded lecture look like a book. Those details can sit in the sentence (“In the 12 February lecture on working memory, …”) but they do not create a reference list entry. Your own handwritten notes are not a source either: they are your notes on a lecture, a slide deck, or a published work. Cite that recoverable item, or cite the live session as a personal communication.
Classroom websites and learning management systems
Once the slides or recording live on the course site, recoverability changes — but only for readers who can log in. Publication Manual §8.8 is written for a student paper in that course, or for an internal company report that uses the company intranet. The 3 March 2026 Common Reference Examples Guide reprints Example 102 from §10.14 as “PowerPoint From a Classroom Website.” Alamo Colleges reprints the Style Center source-element rule, including the official “are you” wording.
APA Style on LMS slides (Publication Manual §10.14, Alamo reprint)
If the slides come from a classroom website, learning management system (e.g., Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai), or company intranet and you are writing for an audience with access to that resource, provide the name of the site and its URL (use the login page URL for sites requiring login).
If the audience for which are you writing does not have access to the slides, cite them as a personal communication.
The second sentence keeps the official wording, including “are you.” That is the Style Center line, not a typo introduced here. It is also the rule that kills a Canvas reference in a manuscript written for readers outside the course. For a thesis, journal article, or public report, either find a public version of the material or cite the session as a personal communication. Royal Roads gives the matching warning in the other direction: do not cite a company intranet report as a recoverable LMS file in a course paper your instructor cannot open.
APA Style Example 102 / Common Reference Examples (3 March 2026): classroom PowerPoint
Reference list:
Mack, R., & Spake, G. (2018). Citing open source images and formatting references for presentations [PowerPoint slides]. Canvas@FNU. https://fnu.onelogin.com/login
Parenthetical citation:
(Mack & Spake, 2018)
Narrative citation:
Mack and Spake (2018)
The site name is Canvas@FNU. The URL is the login page, not a /files/ path that dies when the semester ends. Douglas College reprints the same login-page rule from Publication Manual p. 347 for Blackboard. Franklin University restates it for Canvas@Franklin. Name the LMS your class actually uses — Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, Sakai, or Google Classroom — and end with that system’s login or home page.
Recorded lectures on the LMS
APA Style’s classroom guidance uses the same Example 102 pattern for “a recorded lecture or PowerPoint presentation.” Keep the instructor as author, use the date the recording was posted or delivered, italicize the lecture title, and change only the bracketed description. A labelled template, not an invented course, looks like this:
Template for an LMS lecture recording the class can open
Instructor, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Lecture title [Lecture recording]. LMS Name. https://login-page
Use [Video] instead of [Lecture recording] when the player is simply a course video file and that is how the LMS labels it. A Zoom, Panopto, or Kaltura file that lives only inside Canvas is still an LMS source for a class paper, not a public webinar.
Public PowerPoint slides
When the deck is on the open web, drop the LMS login test. The Style Center PowerPoint page, reprinted by Alamo Colleges, gives a real SlideShare example and the source-element rule.
APA Style on public slides (Alamo reprint)
When the slides are available online to anyone, provide the site name on which they are hosted in the source element of the reference, followed by the URL of the slides.
APA Style: PowerPoint slides available online
Reference list:
Jones, J. (2016, March 23). Guided reading: Making the most of it [PowerPoint slides]. SlideShare. https://www.slideshare.net/hellojenjones/guided-reading-making-the-most-of-it
Parenthetical citation:
(Jones, 2016)
Narrative citation:
Jones (2016)
Jones (2016) is the Style Center’s public-slide example, not a classroom deck with a fake university URL. If you quote a line from a slide, add a locator after the year so a reader can find that slide, the same way a book uses a page number. A common classroom form is (Jones, 2016, Slide 4). Confirm the locator wording your instructor wants. The official Style Center examples use [PowerPoint slides] even when the file might have been built in another program. If the file is Google Slides or Keynote and your instructor wants that label, put it in the same bracket slot — that is a format description, not a different reference type.
When the slides cite someone else
Alamo’s reprint of the official PowerPoint page adds the secondary-source warning students hit every week:
APA Style on citing what a slide itself cites (Alamo reprint)
If the slides contain citations to information published elsewhere, and you want to cite that information as well, then it is best to find, read, and cite the original source yourself rather than citing the slides as a secondary source.
That is the same preference as §8.9. Cite Mack and Spake (2018) for a point those authors made. If their slide quotes a journal article, open the article and cite the article. The secondary-source page is only for the case where the original is gone.
Lecture notes, including untitled notes
Lecture notes follow the same visual-work pattern in §10.14, with one extra trap: untitled notes put a description in square brackets in the title position and do not italicize that description. The Publication Manual’s worked example (p. 347), reprinted by Douglas College and the University of Washington Tacoma APA 7 handout, is Canan and Vasilev’s resource-allocation notes from the University of Chile.
Publication Manual §10.14 untitled lecture notes
Reference list:
Canan, E., & Vasilev, J. (2019, May 22). [Lecture notes on resource allocation]. Department of Management Control and Information Systems, University of Chile. https://uchilefau.academia.edu/ElseZCanan
Parenthetical citation:
(Canan & Vasilev, 2019)
Narrative citation:
Canan and Vasilev (2019)
If the notes had a real title, italicize that title and move the format into the brackets after it: Allocation of resources [Lecture notes]. Do not invent a title to avoid the brackets. Do not label notes [Educational video] or [Guest lecture] — those descriptors are not the ones APA Style uses on the PowerPoint and lecture-note page.
Guest lectures, team teaching, and hybrid courses
The author is the person who delivered the content you used, not the person whose name is on the syllabus. A guest speaker is the author of that session. In a team-taught course, name the instructor who gave that lecture. If two people built the posted slide deck, list both, as Mack and Spake (2018) does.
- Hybrid or flipped courses: cite the copy you actually opened. Sitting in the room with no recording is a personal communication. Playing the Panopto file from Canvas is an LMS reference for a class paper.
- Lecture series: cite each date or file separately. Week numbers belong in the title only when they appear on the source (“Week 3: working memory”).
- Handouts that reprint a chapter or article: cite the published original, not the photocopy. The classroom course pack page says to cite an unchanged reprint as the journal article or chapter it came from. The syllabus and course-pack guide walks through that case.
- Your own lecture notes: those are not a source. They are your notes on a source. Cite the lecture, the slides, or the published work you were writing down.
- Missing date on posted slides: the Creating an APA Style reference list guide says to write n.d. when the date cannot be determined. Do not invent the semester as a year.
What this page is not
A public recorded talk is not a class lecture just because someone stood at a lectern. The 3 March 2026 Common Reference Examples Guide gives two official contrasts you can still open.
Official Common Reference Examples contrasts (3 March 2026)
Public webinar (§10.12), not a class lecture:
Lee, C., McAdoo, T., & Denneny, S. (2023). APA Style seventh edition refresher for instructors [Webinar]. American Psychological Association. https://apastyle.apa.org/instructional-aids/tutorials-webinars
YouTube video (§10.12), not a class lecture:
Above The Noise. (2017, October 18). Can procrastination be a good thing? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMwmBNNOnQ
A YouTube upload uses the account name as author and [Video] as the description. A TED Talk on ted.com names the speaker and TED Conferences. A meeting talk, poster, or symposium contribution is a conference presentation with the full meeting dates. Emails, interviews you conducted, and other private exchanges are on the personal-communications page. A printed syllabus or bound course pack is on the syllabus page. This URL stays with classroom talks, posted course slides, and lecture notes.
Mistakes this page is written to catch
- A reference list entry for a live, unrecorded lecture. Readers cannot retrieve it. APA 7 keeps it in the text only.
- A deep Canvas or Blackboard file URL. For a class paper, use the LMS login or home page. For any wider audience, do not pretend the file is public.
- Treating a public recording as a personal communication. If the talk is on YouTube, an institutional repository, or a MOOC platform a reader can open, it needs a full reference.
- Citing the lecture when the claim is in a published article. APA Style prefers the recoverable research the instructor used.
- Invented descriptors such as [Video lecture], [Guest lecture], or [Educational video]. Use [PowerPoint slides], [Lecture notes], [Lecture recording], [Webinar], or [Video].
- A fake course-and-university source line on a public deck. Jones (2016) ends with SlideShare and the public URL, not “EDUC 101, State University.”
- Italicizing an untitled description. Canan and Vasilev (2019) put [Lecture notes on resource allocation] in roman type in the title position.
- Citing a slide’s bibliography instead of the article. Open the article. The slide is a pointer, not a substitute.
Format the lecture or slide deck in APA 7
Enter the instructor, date, title, and either the LMS login page or the public URL in the APA generator, then check the italics, brackets, and ending against the official Mack, Jones, Canan, Paradis, and Nguyen examples on this page. The short formatted walkthrough is lecture notes in APA.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I put a classroom lecture in the APA reference list?
- Only if readers can recover it. An unrecorded class talk is a personal communication: initials, surname, the words personal communication, and the date, in the text only. Posted slides or a recording the class can open on the LMS get a full reference. The Creating an APA Style reference list guide (23 February 2022) names personal communications as the list exception.
- How do I cite Canvas or Blackboard slides in APA 7?
- For a paper written in that course, follow Example 102: instructor as author, year, italic sentence-case title, [PowerPoint slides], the LMS name, and the login or home page URL. Mack and Spake (2018) on Canvas@FNU is the official pattern in the 3 March 2026 Common Reference Examples Guide.
- What if my reader cannot log into the LMS?
- APA Style says to cite those slides as a personal communication. Do not paste a password link into a thesis or journal manuscript. If a public copy exists, cite that copy instead.
- How do I cite a professor's PowerPoint on SlideShare?
- Use the public-slide form. Jones, J. (2016, March 23). Guided reading: Making the most of it [PowerPoint slides]. SlideShare. plus the SlideShare URL is the Style Center example. Name the public site, not the course code.
- How do I cite lecture notes that have no title?
- Put a description in square brackets in the title position and do not italicize it, then name the department and university. Canan and Vasilev (2019), [Lecture notes on resource allocation], is the Publication Manual p. 347 example.
- Should I cite the lecture or the journal article the lecture was based on?
- Cite the recoverable published work whenever it contains the claim. APA Style says a personal-communication lecture citation is for original content that is not published elsewhere. The same rule applies when a slide quotes an article: open the article.
- How do I cite a guest lecture in APA 7?
- Name the guest, not the course coordinator. If the session was unrecorded, use a personal communication with the guest's initials and the date. If the guest's slides or recording sit on the LMS and you are writing for that class, use the Mack and Spake LMS pattern with the guest as author.
- Is a TED Talk, webinar, or YouTube lecture cited like a class lecture?
- No. A public video is a video reference. A public archived webinar uses [Webinar], as Lee, McAdoo, and Denneny (2023) does in the Common Reference Examples Guide. Use the YouTube guide on this site rather than the classroom templates on this page.
- Do I need permission to cite my professor's lecture?
- A personal-communication citation documents that you heard the claim. It is not a copyright license to reproduce slides. For a class paper, quoting a short passage with a citation is normal academic practice. Reproducing a whole deck still needs the copyright holder's permission.
- How do I cite several lectures from the same course?
- Cite each recoverable file or each unrecorded date separately. Two Canvas decks become two references. Two live talks become two personal-communication dates. Do not collapse a semester into one entry.