I know that the beamer documentclass provides some information on "Splitting a Course Into Lectures" (see Section 9.4 on p 81 of the package documentation) by means of the command \lecture. From the package documentation:
When using beamer with the article mode, you may wish to have the
lecture notes of a whole course reside in one file. In this case, only
a few frames are actually part of any particular lecture.
The \lecture command makes it easy to select only a certain set of
frames from a file to be presented. This command takes (among other
things) a label name. If you say \includeonlylecture with this label
name, then only the frames following the corresponding \lecture
command are shown. The frames following other \lecture commands are
suppressed.
By default, the \lecture command has no other effect. It does not
create any frames or introduce entries in the table of contents.
However, you can use \AtBeginLecture to have BEAMER insert, say, a
title page at the beginning of (each) lecture.
It also provides you with the means to produce "handouts" of your lectures via the documentclass option
\documentclass[handout]{beamer}
On "Creating the Handout", the package documentation mentions:
Once your talk is fixed, you can create a handout, if this seems
appropriate. For this, you can use the class option handout as
explained in Section 21.1. Typically, you might wish to put several
handout slides on one page, see below on how to do this easily.
You may also wish to create an article version of your talk. An
"article version" of your presentation is a normal TeX text typeset
using, for example, the document class article or perhaps llncs or
a similar document class. The BEAMER class offers facilities to have
this version coexist with your presentation version in one file and to
share code. Also, you can include slides of your presentation as
figures in your article version. Details on how to setup the article
version can be found in Section 21.2.
If your interested in following an example of how to set up a presentation/lecture using beamer, consider the bed-time reading of Beamer by Example by Andrew Mertz & William Slough - part of PracTeX Journal 2005, no 4.
In addition to the above suggested reading, Googling for 'beamer templates' leads to some links that will give you a good feel for what beamer can do, and get you started:
