Attack of the PowerPoint-Wielding Professors 467
theodp writes "A CS student blogger named Carolyn offers an interesting take on why learning from PowerPoint lectures is frustrating. Unlike an old-school chalk talk, professors who use PowerPoint tend to present topics very quickly, leaving little time to digest the visuals or to take learning-reinforcing notes. Also, profs who use the ready-made PowerPoint lectures that ship with many textbooks tend to come across as, shall we say, less than connected with their material. Then there are professors who just don't know how to use PowerPoint, a problem that is by no means limited to college classes."
It Works If The Professor Made the Slides (Score:5, Interesting)
Chalk talk rules (Score:5, Interesting)
Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.
Overheads Rock (Score:3, Interesting)
The rise of PowerPoint for teaching is something I've been annoyed with for years. Honestly the best teaching tool my Professors ever used was the overhead transparency projector -- the type where the transparency was on a spool that the professor cranked to get a clean surface. This was far more legible then chalk, plus you could go crank the transparency spool in the opposite direction after class if you missed something. Not chalk dust either.
Powerpoint is annoying as professors tend to only put meaningless bullet points and skip working out the equations in real time, explaining as they go along. A good professor is interactive with the class, not just someone who reads from a script pointed at the screen. Sadly, this is way most (but not all) PowerPoint professors operate.
Be careful what you wish for (Score:2, Interesting)
Be careful what you wish for.
I had a professor that DID know what he was talking about, he decided that he wanted us to learn so much in a single course that this was a common occurance.
Professor arrives in class. 3 seconds later he has an overhead projector up and is now talking and writing directly on blank transparancy paper. The rate at which he was writing was near stream-of-consciousness. I typically took 20-30 PAGES of notes in a single lecture, and these notes were basically a transcription of his non-stop lecture. You couldn't afford to miss a single thing he said. He basically wrote one one sheet, slid it to the other side of the projector, and then started another one on the right side. If you were a fast writer, you could just finish up the previous page just as he completed the next.
The problem was that he did know what he was talking about, but it was the ultra-condenced version. You had to go home and take a few hours to review the classes transcript. Thankfully, he scanned his sheets and sent them out the next week. I doubt I could have survived that class on my notes alone.
Although it was nice in that since he wrote almost everything down, any accent barriers were inconsequential.
(The course wasn't a walk in the park either, it was our digital signals processing course)
Re:Actually (Score:3, Interesting)
True -
working in IT support, I see so many professors who are frustrated by students who are playing solitaire, chatting, or even doing homework for another class during a lecture. The most insecure want some kind of technology solution to shut down all the student wi-fi during classes. These tend to be the same professors reading the text copied from the publisher's PowerPoint pack in a monotone drone.
Anyone contemplating using PP or any other class presentation software/s should be forced to sit through at least one Edward Tufte lecture.. some of his proposals are a little extreme, but I've seen the lectures and bought the library. http://www.edwardtufte.com/ [edwardtufte.com]
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:1, Interesting)
i think the note taking skills (or lack there of) of the students is a contributing factor to the sub-optimal transmission of information during college level education.
Re:Actually (Score:3, Interesting)
Many professors or would be professors have little to no skill or training as instructors.
Quite true. The university system rewards publications, not teaching. It's amusing that, to teach first grade, you have to take several years of classes and a couple of student teaching-assignments to get a certificate, but to teach college, you need to have only a good background in research.
Of course, as far as I can tell from talking to my friends who are teachers, 95% of the content of the educational curriculum is worthless. (I do occasionally hear praise for about 5% of it.)
Re:Actually (Score:3, Interesting)
We can take this further: if you're lecturing the whole time, you've already failed. Lecturing. Doesn't. Work.
(And the blogger's cited study not withstanding, I've also seen studies that show that sitting in lecture furiously taking notes is *not* an effective way of learning. It may be better than sitting in lecture and zoning, but it's far better not to lecture.)
I'm a professor and I do use PowerPoint. For the 10-20 minutes of each period (70 min) that I actually am in lecture mode, anyway. It lets me post notes ahead of time (something many students have thanked me for, both for saving them time and for when they've gotten sick), put extra notes at the end I don't intended to cover in class (but want to add for anyone interested) and include a lot of figures and images that wouldn't work well with the board or transparencies. (A slide projector would, at minimum, be required.)
Now, granted, I don't follow my slides slavishly. I frequently (too frequently, it feels like) diverge from them. And I don't expect my lecture to actually cover the entire material. That's daft. The students have to do the reading, even in a science class. The lecture is just there to highlight the important points, add anything I feel would help, or clarify a poorly explained bit of the text. (The latter happens rarely since I chose the textbook carefully.)
Little time to digest, heh (Score:3, Interesting)
"Unlike an old-school chalk talk, professors who use PowerPoint tend to present topics very quickly, leaving little time to digest the visuals or to take learning-reinforcing notes"
Sounds like how my professors used to lecture with printed slides and, to a lesser extent, when writing slides by hand during the lecture. To cover the material, the lectures couldn't really have gone much slower but this can be addressed by providing students with decent printed notes, which all too often were missing or of extremely poor quality. The degree was very educational but to a large extent this was due to the hard work of students in their study time and due to the small group teaching that followed the lectures and attempted to pick up the pieces.
Not fantastic value-for-money given how expensive these courses are - but to some extent, that's what's going to happen if you choose *teaching* roles based on how good at research a professor is. Or for that matter, based on how senior and entrenched in the department and university a professor is. If you're going to pay someone to do something, you ought to have some decent oversight and minimum standards they are required to meet. Universities are not good at this sort of thing in my experience.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:5, Interesting)
At least you can print PowerPoints. I had numerous good teachers print out all the slides in the 'notes' layout. Where 1/2 the page was the slide and the other half was blank. 3 hole punch it and toss it in your folder.
1) It kept you from wasting time replicating something that already existed
2) You could still mark it up in your own words so that you knew what it meant.
Some even had tablet PCs that they would write on the presentation and send out that marked up version after class.
PowerPoint, Whiteboards, Chalk, etc are just tools. Professors have been good and bad at implementing tools since the beginning of time.
One of the best professors I knew came to class with only 4 color markers. No prepared notes, no book, no equation sheet. The school rewarded him with a semester off because too many of my idiotic classmates failed his class one semester. (Where as classes in the previous 20 semesters he taught seemed to muster up at least 80% passing).
Re:Actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I'd like to see university courses trimmed down to just setting curriculum and evaluation. The university could then offer additional services if the student feels that they are necessary. Books, classes, labs, TAs could all be available but not manditory for the student.
All those professors that gloat that they fail half their classes can get pushed out by professors with good success rates. If the useless ass at the front of the class is just going to read the book, fuck him I'll buy the book and read it myself. He can do whatever he wants as long as I don't have to pay for it.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to work for a college textbook publisher. Give me pretty much ANY class and I could teach it - that's how many different teaching aids we produced. (Transparencies, Test Banks, Videos, Teacher's Guides, TA Handbooks...)
It comes down to the prof, not the tool. Great profs would use them to assist their teaching style, lazy profs would use it instead of building their own lesson plans.
Re:Actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. CS PhD here.
I have been reading the "Power Presenter" ( http://www.amazon.com/Power-Presenter-Technique-Strategy-Americas/dp/0470376481 [amazon.com] ) to improve my presentation skills.
I was surprised in the wrong way when preparing y first demonstration course during my PhD years in the UK. It seems everyone uses overhead slides for *all* lectures (every single day).
Having studied my undergraduate courses in a public university in Mexico, I was raised by chalkboard and (if you were lucky to get the room) whiteboard lectures.
Whiteboard in my opinion encourages the interaction between student and teacher. Of course I do remember a teacher whose "teaching" consisted in turning the back to the students and write in the blackboard whatever chunk of text he had prepared the night before (or maybe 5 years ago).
Another issue that saddened me from the UK was the lack of communication between the teacher and the students. I remember becoming good friend with several of my teachers during undergrad. In the UK, as each class has more than 50 students, the teacher only goes to the classroom, talks his slides and gets out of the room. If there are any assignments they are usually explained in the last slide.
But I guess that different types of education are suitable for different types of people.
No, it's school (Score:2, Interesting)
Learning is easy because it's an innate human ability. Humans learn best when it's trial and error, through discovery and at their own pace. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit in with the structured classroom where everyone is forced to learn at a minimum pace and using the same materials.
Formal education is backwards and was designed for the ease of the teacher.
PowerPoint doesn't bore people, people bore people (Score:2, Interesting)
While it is important that there are opportunities for use of different learning styles, (such as the blogger wanting to be able to take notes during a talk) there will also be others that learn differently.
The blogger may find it best to take notes on everything that the professor is saying - there are others for whom it will be most productive to sit and listen intently and not take any notes at all.
The problem seems to be then, not the PowerPoint itself, but the pacing that the professors use. If they are to do problems on PowerPoint, they should have the steps appear gradually as they are working through the problem, and use the appropriate pacing, to ensure that students have the opportunity to follow the problem.
As for not having handouts of the PowerPoint slide, or their availability being in some way a disadvantage - I would say it's time to grow up. Adults are responsible for their own learning. If someone knows that they learn best by taking notes, then take notes anyway. The availability of the notes after the class will be something very positive for many others, and to request that the notes not be available for their sake is to fail to recognize the learning needs of others.
From the other side (Score:2, Interesting)
I’ve been a computer science professor for many years at a very good university, and in most of my classes I try to *only* use slides for images or diagrams that are so complicated or precise that I would not want to reproduce them by hand. Everything else is either me talking or writing on the whiteboard. Sometimes I have handwritten notes to remind me what topics I wanted to cover.
My students, for the most part, HATE this. It completely turns their expectations of a class upside down. After a few weeks, I start getting a deluge of “when are the slides going to be online” from the students who never attend class and don’t realize that there aren’t slides. Even students who *are* in class complain bitterly that they don’t have “anything to study from”. I’ve had students complain (in groups, sometimes with signed petitions) to my department chair and to my dean, saying that not providing slides creates (and I quote from one recent complaint) an “unreasonable expectation of attendance and/or note-taking”. I have fielded angry phone calls from PARENTS saying that their student isn’t doing well in my course because I’m not providing him/her with the “expected study aids”. None of this is made up.
I’ve seen identical behavior from freshmen in a required core course, seniors in a high-level elective, and graduate students in an automata-theory course. At least in the automata course they have a textbook so wonderfully clear that they really *can* learn the material from it (Sipser, and no I didn’t write it). They all crave powerpoint and suffer withdrawal when they don’t have it, because it means they have to engage in (and go to!) the lecture and not just try to cram from the slides at the last minute.
When I receive these complaints, I explain as patiently as I can that these are precisely the reasons I eschew slides, and why I value the attention and dialogue that writing and extemporaneous speaking facilitate. I think students get the point, but they didn’t come to college to think, try, and learn. They came to college so they could get a degree so they can get a job, and anything that stands in their way must be stopped.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it's gonna get worse... (Score:3, Interesting)
In college we did a course on effective communications... one of the things they drilled into us is that the slides are not the handout or the report, the slides belong with the presentation. Somewhat paradoxically good slides cannot stand on their own; if you provide them as a handout, they will require supporting text (which Powerpoint provides space for, by the way!). Don't be tempted to put everything on the slides themselves.
Sadly I see more and more reports and documents being crammed into monolythic and insanely ill-structured Powerpoints, which get presented then get mailed round as the final documentation to be archived. Send a "proper" presentation with supporting documentation, and you'll get complaints about the poor quality of your slides; the document that contains the imformation that is actually important will go unread, of course. Send only the document, and they'll reply: "I am not reading all that", even if there is a good executive summary.
(ps. That doesn't mean that we do not produce Word documents anymore, on the contrary! Preferably documents based on ill-designed templates asking for meaningless and/or useless informations, that serves only to tick certain boxes in the process, and will be filed unread and unused. Oh, I'm not bitter or anything...)
I am a prof, and I agree!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Damn, I wish my school administration would read this. Every time a building is remodeled, the projector screens get larger and the boards get smaller. In the newest rooms, the whiteboard is about 70cm high and 140cm wide (30" by 60") - nearly useless. Meanwhile, the projection screen is huge, six or eight times that size. I am forced to put most of my material in the presentation. There ain't no other way to do it!
While I'm venting: there are no blackboards anymore, only whiteboards. Why anyone think these abominations are progress is beyond me: the pens can't deliver ink fast enough - the first few words are nice, then they get faint and the pens don't recover until they sit for a good, long while. I suppose the suits didn't like chalk dust on their pinstripes, but give me a good quality blackboard any day.
We're getting a new school building in two years. I will probably need a magnifying glass to find the whiteboards. Assuming they haven't been eliminated entirely...
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:5, Interesting)
At least you can print PowerPoints. I had numerous good teachers print out all the slides in the 'notes' layout. Where 1/2 the page was the slide and the other half was blank. 3 hole punch it and toss it in your folder.
1) It kept you from wasting time replicating something that already existed 2) You could still mark it up in your own words so that you knew what it meant.
I've been guest lecturing in a couple of grad level classes for the past 4.5 years while working on my PhD and I used to do what you indicate here. However, I found that students would skip class, space out while I was speaking, and fail to ask questions when I wasn't being clear enough for them. By the 2nd class no one was taking any notes. Even when I went off script and indicated that they needed to take notes on what I was saying.
The last couple of times I've used PPT, but refused to print out the slides in any form (Except for a student who missed a bunch of time while sick, but I made sure to impress upon her the importance of getting the notes from someone else). By doing this grades have gone up despite me using the same basic slides and covering the same material. Forcing them to actually take handwritten notes means they get the experiential learning of writing the material down at least once.
One of the best professors I knew came to class with only 4 color markers. No prepared notes, no book, no equation sheet. The school rewarded him with a semester off because too many of my idiotic classmates failed his class one semester. (Where as classes in the previous 20 semesters he taught seemed to muster up at least 80% passing).
My advisor teaches this way. I always thought it was just him being too behind the times, but now I know that forcing us to take handwritten notes as he writes out the material on the overhead helps them learn the material and stay focused on what's going on in class.
Re:Stick and dirt (Score:3, Interesting)
When the student is ready to learn something, the teacher will become available.
If this were even remotely close to true, the world would be a much better place. We need more teachers, and as a society we're not promoting them. Everything from the way we pay actual teachers-by-trade to the way our society addresses founts of knowledge as "know-it-alls" and "smart-asses" blunts the urge to teach.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:2, Interesting)
"However, I found that students would skip class, space out while I was speaking, and fail to ask questions when I wasn't being clear enough for them. By the 2nd class no one was taking any notes. Even when I went off script and indicated that they needed to take notes on what I was saying."
Exactly. But it's worse than that. When something comes up in the news and I discuss it in class, or someone raises a good question, I sometimes write and draw on the board. When I test the students on that material I get complaints that "it wasn't in the slides", from both the people who weren't there and even from the people who were! This occurs despite the fact that I emphasize at the start of the term and throughout that "not everything is in the slides, so you'll want to take notes" and "you won't be able to understand everything from the slides alone".
Not all students are lazy, but they fall into bad habits as easily as instructors can, and PowerPoint slides make it easy to do so.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:4, Interesting)
Death By Powerpoint (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't fix stupid.
Where as classes in the previous 20 semesters he taught seemed to muster up at least 80% passing
I've had a similar professor. He made you know the material, and know it damn well (it was a statics [wikipedia.org] class, not to be confused with statistics).
Out of a class of probably two dozen, only myself and one girl were left to take the final exam. Everybody else dropped out because he made them work too hard, boo hoo. I got my A and moved on. I have no idea what grade the girl got, but if I hadn't been such a hopeless geek I might have asked her out. She was good-looking and if she stuck in the class that long you know she had to be pretty smart.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
I once had a sociology class with a guy like that. He would literally spend the entire class ("Sociology of Religion" specifically) talking about running triathlons and all the drugs he had done in his life. One day the entire class time was dedicated to a guest lecture from one of his triathlete buddies (who talked mostly about the importance of proper stretching). The closest he ever came to talking about the subject of the class was when he went on a two-class tear about his various experiences with peyote (I did learn a lot about how to properly drink peyote without puking).
His testing methology in the class was absolutely bizarre (and he even admitted it in the first class). These tests consisted of 30-50 questions on material which was covered neither in his lectures nor the text (at least the text was on subject). Then he would grade on a curve. I consistently set the curve in the class with 50%-60% scores (and only because I had good general knowledge, not because I could possibly study for such bizarre "tests"). So I walked out of the class with a 100% average, with no knowledge whatsoever of the subject the class was supposed to be about. About the only thing I learned in the class was that the professor was batshit crazy and that tenure is the bulletproof vest of academia.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes you wonder where all that tuition money is going. The average student graduates something like $100k in debt it seems - probably a lot more these days. That is an incredible amount of money to spend on an eduction, and for the life of me I can't figure out where it is all going.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
They do - I run several labs at a community college, and for some reason students want to print everything they get their hands on. Anyhow I saw some A&P slides in the recycle bin with a publisher trademark on them.
Re:Most professors guilty? (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me get this straight: You want an institution where you are given an exam, and if you pass it you get the degree? No books, no classes, no labs, no instructors unless you ask for them specifically? I believe you are looking for The University of Phoenix at best, or a diploma mill at worst.
If you seriously think that your proposed approach would result in a quality education, you're delusional.