A student writes in the University of Saskatchewan newspaper:

… Think about what you’re paying for each class. In Term 2 there are approximately 24 lectures per course. With the course costing approximately $600 and the text at, oh say $100, that’s nearly $30 per class. For about an hour long lecture, is it really worth the money? For 30 bucks you could go see two movies … and even get snacks for each! Even if one of the movies sucks, you’re still getting more entertainment value than a prof reading some PowerPoint slides.

Oh, sure, sure, but school isn’t about entertainment. It’s about learning and education. Let’s not lie to ourselves; there’s not much of that going on. So if we aren’t learning we should at least be entertained. And as fun as it is watching documentaries when the prof is too lazy to give a lecture; it’s just not worth the moolah…

From a University of Texas student’s opinion piece about his junior year there:

The structure of [one] class was a bit difficult to deal with at times, as the professor often put a ridiculously large amount of information on each of his powerpoint slides, filling up each slide and making it look almost like a wall of text

… notices something.

At 55, I’ve recently returned to university (undergraduate BScN) after graduating from my second undergraduate degree in 1990.

Many lectures now consist of someone simply reading what is on a PowerPoint presentation, and expanding on the points with whatever comes into their head. In the past, what I valued was the lecturer sharing what they knew about the topic from their own research or real world experience. To have someone reiterate what I’ve already read in the text is a waste of my time.

My vote would be to get rid of PowerPoint presentations. That would force lecturers to prepare to lecture rather than provide McEducation.

Here’s a blog post, plus a long comment thread, on the glories of PowerPoint use in the classroom.

Excerpts:

I get nothing out of [one particular] class. The instructor uses Web CT for grading, submissions, and announcements.

His lectures are all Powerpoint presentations. He didn’t write the presentations. He downloaded them from the same place I did, the textbook publisher’s website. No new material that is not in the book or on the Powerpoints is introduced. The only reason I go to class is because he will display a screen shot of what he wants done in the programming assignments.

As a tuition paying student I should get more out of class than what I would get if I just phoned in … my assignment.

The irresponsibility and cynicism of the professor described here is so flagrant that the student ends up looking like a dupe. Do you let scam artists into your home? No – the minute you see them slithering down the street, you lock your door. You should know, after one class session with a professor of this type, to drop the course.

The post has fifty-one comments so far. Take a look. Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the post itself — more explanation from a student as to why Powerpoint is designed for lazy professors.

…[M]any textbooks now come with ready-made PowerPoint lectures for each chapter. The problem is that when the professor does not make the presentation, they run the risk of sounding like they don’t know what they’re talking about. My current Operating Systems professor suffers from this. As each new slide comes up, he takes a second to read it and then starts with, “Okay, what this slide is talking about is …” or “What they mean by this is …” As opposed to explaining the material himself, it sounds like he just expects us to read the slides, and then let him elaborate. The primary instruction comes from the slides, and he just backs it up…

Could these two comments be any sadder? Any more scandalous? What are they saying? They’re saying that these professors aren’t teaching at all. A disgusting situation, for so many reasons. Here’s a pragmatic one: It can’t go on. Universities full of assholes who don’t teach will go out of business. Students will catch on to the scam. Simple as that.

Central Michigan University’s newspaper says many important things about PowerPoint use in the classroom. The article is very strong, but the student comment AFTER the article is even stronger.

Let’s take a look.

For Robert Bailey, using PowerPoint slides for his class lectures hinder a student’s learning capabilities.

Bailey, a professor of biology, teaches three entry-level biology courses and said he tries to keep PowerPoint use to a minimum.

“I used anywhere from 30 to 50 slides per class when I first started teaching and would give students print versions of the slides, but it didn’t take long for attendance to come down,” he said. “Before Thanksgiving break one year, only 10 students showed up for our final unit on human genetics. I knew I had to do something.”   [Point One, among many obvious points: Provide the same information online and students won't come to class. UD is absolutely certain there are professors who welcome this outcome. Most do not.]

Bailey said students cannot seem to decide what is important from a PowerPoint presentation and think everything posted is golden.

“It’s convenient to use PowerPoint slides for large lecture classes, but students get caught up in trying to write everything down and spend their time writing instead of listening,” he said.   [Point Two, equally obvious: Too much information. The student who comments below will elaborate on the point.]

It can be useful, however.

“We just need to remember that less is more. Slides should contain the most useful information. I try not showing more than 10 slides per class. I believe active, not passive, learning is the most beneficial,” Bailey said. “By active learning, I mean group interaction, where we all can get a better understanding of what the issues are and solve them.”   [Point Three, yet more obvious. Turn people into confused sheeplike herds and they're unlikely to learn anything.]

… [S]ophomore Brett McMahon said he does not like when PowerPoint slides are used in his classes.

“I like when teachers physically write on the board what they feel we need to know. PowerPoint presentations don’t make classes harder, just confusing. I never know what to write down and how much,” he said… [Point Four: Not only some discussion is crucial; clear signals about what the professor considers important to know are crucial. The things we go to the trouble of writing on the board with our very own fingers are the important things, not the twelve bullet points some book has provided for your slide. Physically writing on the board is also letting the students watch the professor's brain operate right there in front of them. PowerPoint of course makes professors just as passive as it makes students.  Everyone reads off of a nice neat packaged page. Writing on the board is messy, human, dynamic -- thought in motion. Active.]

[F]reshman Erika Schrand said knowing what to copy is easier when professors write directly on the board.

“Sometimes teachers put too much information on the slides and I can’t sort what is important from all the other excess information,” she said.

[Now to the comment.]

One Response to “Some CMU faculty moving away from PowerPoint presentations in classroom”

Antonio says:

Professors trying to use Powerpoint for their lectures has been my biggest pet-peeve while attending CMU. It’s a waste of paper, ink, and time, and only increases tuition to cover the cost of the paper and ink wasted when students print out full slides of black background presentations.

No offense to the professors, as I’ve had many great ones over the years, but I’ve never had a professor who provided notes correctly by use of a computer. (Ok, maybe one). Most of the time, the idea of outline organization has been non-existent.

I do realize professional seminars and events such as TED seminars often use Powerpoints, but the environments there are completely different than a classroom.

To the professors: Anyone can remember and regurgitate information given to us on pre-made Powerpoint presentations, but if it’s information we could have critically and actively filtered through while simply listening to you speak, why make a Powerpoint for it? Why not just give us the ideas and concepts you want us to understand without dividing our attention away from listening to instead focusing on a big projector with the SAME thing you just said, just in different wording?

This makes even less sense when you take into account how much professors usually dislike all the new technology, anyway. Why give us Powerpoint notes, base exams solely on those notes, and then mark us down for not coming to class? What do you honestly expect to come of that?

The only bigger interest killer I’ve seen is when professors spend 5-10 minutes trying to project a piece of paper that everyone already has. Why do we need to see it in two different places? We know how to follow along.

Contrary to popular belief, it is very possible to give a lecture without all these external visual aids. Every time a new semester begins, or there is some problem with the computer network, up to 5-10 minutes or more is wasted trying to figure out the technology, and if it doesn’t work, the professor acts like he/she doesn’t know what to do. For some reason, it seems academic administrations have forgotten the simple tool of speaking outward to a classroom without all this technology mumbo jumbo.

Conclusion: Step away from trying to fumble with the technology and tell us what you want us to know. If the technology is absolutely necessary for your lecture, figure it out beforehand instead of during class time.

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Teach us something.

Speak to us.

Outwardly.

BE.

THERE.

NOW.

… by a graduating senior.

Everyone [has] told me to stop thinking [negative thoughts] and to enjoy what should be the best time of my life. I never understood what is meant by that, ‘the best time of my life.’ I couldn’t understand how sitting in a lecture hall day after day listening to professors read off PowerPoint slides to rooms full of half-asleep students was ‘the best time of my life.’

A Boston University student ponders PowerPoint vs. the old ways.

What we potentially lose in our tech-laden classrooms is the explanation of slide-simplified concepts, the engagement of figuring out your professor’s handwriting and scribbling down whatever he/she just wrote, and even the need, and more importantly will, to go to class and learn. Hark! The herald angels chalked.

The essay’s an intriguing riff on boredom… UD has already encountered in her reading about universities speculation that professors and students are drawn to classroom technology because many of them have come to enjoy being bored…

Or is it, UD wonders, that the classroom session has morphed into the classroom sesshin — a Zen sitting with soft lights, muttering monks, and the white noise of heating systems? The dharma was downloaded last Wednesday, so you don’t have to listen… The hour and ten minutes devotes itself to the most radical revision of university education in our time: Empty your head.

Starts like this.

When it comes to using technology to foster education, the prevailing wisdom has been that more is better. Over the past decade, universities around the globe have invested heavily in the wired classroom, adding everything from external laptop connections to Blu-ray DVD players. But there is little evidence that these gadgets enhance learning–and, critics argue, they might actually hinder it, making both students and teachers passive. What if classrooms were restored to the pre-Internet days of wooden tables and chalk?

Then there’s this bit about José Bowen, Mr Teach Naked.

Then it concludes.

Technology has a place in education, but it should be used independently by students outside the classroom. That gives them more time to absorb lectures via podcast or video, and frees teachers to spend class time coaching students in how to apply the material rather than simply absorb it.

Duh.

PowerPoint in England, from The Times:

Bertan Budak, [a student at Durham University, says]: “Lecturers are not interesting while teaching in class because they only say things rather than teaching. A lecturer spends more of lecturing time concentrating on PowerPoint presentations rather than focusing on the students.”

From the article’s comment thread:

A common tale amongst many graduates, myself included. A few weeks into the second year I realised… lectures will always be a case of reiterating bullet points on the PowerPoint presentation…

For the latter half of my uni education I, along with many of my classmates, brought in other material so we spent the time wisely, instead of listening to a balding guy repeating what was said on the screen.

… which knows an important trend when it sees one.

… in this Newsweek article featuring a group of great university professors.

Let’s look at how the reporter introduces the subject. Beginning of first paragraph:

There are few better fixes for insomnia than listening to a professor read her PowerPoint to you, slide by slide. And that can be a good thing, especially if you’ve been up all night playing Rock Band. But discovering a teacher who wakes you up instead of putting you to sleep is one of the most rewarding college experiences you can have…

Hey. I didn’t write it. Turns out I’m not the only one who knows most classroom PowerPoint use sucks.

The first featured professor has a fifty-student class. It’s a discussion class.

[Bob Goldberg] says the key is to let students know you notice them and keep them actively engaged at all times. For him, teaching is a lot like his chosen field of study. “It is really about experimentation,” says Goldberg, 65. He is constantly trying new things to get students involved: asking them to swab their cheeks for DNA analysis, tossing them heads of lettuce and asking, “Is this lettuce in its original form? What about this one?!” …Despite the class size, he wants all his students to know each other and feel comfortable participating in discussions. … Eden Maloney, class of 2012, was intimidated when Goldberg called her up to the front of the class to summarize a previous lecture (a Goldberg classroom staple), but, she says, “I learned not only critical analysis but also how to think clearly under pressure. Those skills are invaluable and go far beyond the classroom.”

This high-energy professor, a lad of 65, puts students on the spot. He calls them up to the front of the room to make presentations.

Another:

[William Flesch's] goal in the classroom: to get students to argue with him. “If you agree with everything I’m saying, I’ve failed,” he says. He takes that philosophy to heart, baiting his students to get them to debate among themselves and asking them to design their papers in the same manner…

Yet another:

Every week [Kathleen] Canning lectures for an hour, then steps back to allow discussion. “It’s key to listen, to let the students grab the material, work with it, and get as far as they can,” she says.

Small sample, I know. And not all of these people have big classes. None of them have enormous classes, etc.

But what keeps coming across to UD is the human drama of their classrooms — a combination of eager passion on the part of the professor for the subject; an equally eager passion on his or her part for discussion and debate; an ability to set intelligent terms for the discussion through some lecturing; and, finally, what I’d call an instinctive sympathetic interest in the professor’s students.

It’s not that these professors are hams, grabbing people by the lapels; they’re simply energetic organized minds attracted to other minds. They’re sincerely interested in an intellectual connection with their students. They take their students seriously as intellects, that is; they’re not condescending, but rather provocative, demanding, leading them on…

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People want to be awakened.

PowerPoint is the opiate of the classes.

… interviews Florida Atlantic University professors on the subject of PowerPoint, and gets some fascinating responses:

… One FAU professor said PowerPoint can be a crutch for “lousy” teachers who drag out the same old lectures, or, um, PPT’s (PowerPoint Presentations) each year.

Another has gone as far as to request a room change when he was put in a techie FAU business college classroom where he had to write on a small computer pad to have words projected on a screen.

“I said, ‘Oh forget this, just give me some chalk,’” said FAU history professor Stephen Engle, who advocates teaching through telling stories. “I want the oldest classroom on the campus.”

Might make a good rallying cry for the growing PowerPoint Pissoff brigade.

OH FORGET THIS. JUST GIVE ME SOME CHALK.

Freakonomics finds the correct headline:

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TEACHER CHEATING

Freakonomics also finds the correct words:

Ubiquitous in classrooms, PowerPoint makes lecturing easy, boring, and forgettable … That’s exactly why lazy students like it: if their teacher isn’t truly engaging with the material, they don’t have to either…

Many commenters on the post – students, professors, businesspeople – also find the correct words. A sample:

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I’ve been out of college for a couple years, but I began seeing PP as a cop-out for true lecturing and presentation skills back in high school (when everyone was jumping on and just loving it)…

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The powerpoint problem has been realized in the DOD for years, and is the butt of jokes at all ranks. It is actively despised by the poor souls who try to condense complex 30 page reports into 3-4 bullets, and those forced to sit through them.

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I speak professionally on a regular occasion and I loathe PowerPoint; however, it’s just taken as commonplace at meetings. Instead of paying attention to your presentation the attendees are busy on the Blackberries while then relying on you to give them copies of the presentation.

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So nice to hear I am not alone in loathing the standard Power Point presentation, wherein we must see the slides, have them read to us, and then take them home. Why not just email the lecture to us to read in our pajamas?

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…PowerPoint and similar software programs have a single purpose. They fill that need very, very well. If what you need is something that aligns with that need, then you should definitely use them.

That purpose is persuasion.

They are, fundamentally, sales tools. They very effectively show (just) your side of the story, in a slick, shiny, carefully constructed, but artificial, environment that makes whatever you say appear to be neater and more logically progressive than it really is.

“Persuasion” is not “informing people”. It is not “educating people.” It is the opposite of “getting people to think about options, alternatives, and flaws in your line of argument.”

If your actual need is different, then you should NOT use them. Sure: with sufficient effort, you can use the software to do something else — say, by turning off all the PowerPoint-y features and using it as a means of displaying text that you would otherwise write on a chalkboard. Or displaying your name and contact information in the background while you just talk. I hear you can import movies into software and use it instead of a regular DVD player, too.

But if you’re not selling anything, you should instead choose tools that are better suited to your actual need, like “paragraphs on paper” or “hands-on demonstration” or whatever best communicates your ideas and information….

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I teach at the university level. Many professors use Power Point. I never have. Why?

The best way to engage a class — whether there are 10 or 300 students is to talk as though you’re talking to one person. Improvise each lecture to some degree, even if you’ve covered the material many times before; give example of subject matter as they occur to you…

Power Point is more like reading a lecture: b o r i n g ! Engage your audience by having a conversation with “one” person — even if there are hundreds in the venue.

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Just graduated from college and I hated almost every class that used powerpoint. Made every class boring and hard to pay attention.

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Don’t use it for math. I had a math class that did this and learned 0.

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I have presented using PP and I find it is better to plan a dynamic presentation, engage your audience, and then hand out the notes at the end. You are guaranteed more interaction and questions if you give them the notes on the presentation at the end.

Why not engage more, encourage people to pay attention and ask educated questions. Include them in the learning process!

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[PP] presenters essentially treat the audience as illiterates and read the content of their slides OR they do not read the slides, expecting the audience to read them while they talk about something else. Too often, presenters (me included) prepare slides with so much content that neither they nor their audience can possibly read them because it is very difficult to dumb down complex points to Twitter format.

AND it is far too easy to essentially lecture to one’s slides and not to the audience, thereby missing critically important data about listeners’ reactions. I also agree with others who point out that when listeners know that they will receive copies of the slides, they feel free to use the time to prepare shopping lists, think through their schedules, and other tasks that are far removed from the topics at hand. What should be a tool that facilitates learning seems more often than not to impede it in my experience.

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Powerpoint is truly where education goes to die. Such lazy, lazy professors. All they do now is stand there and read off their powerpoint slides, which they probably just recycle semester after semester. What is even the point in going to class? You can just download the powerpoint slides, which some professors make available now, perhaps in a tacit admission of, “yeah, I’m useless and I know it.” Lots of professors hate undergrads and really only care about getting on with their research, and this is an expression of it.

If you are a professor and you rely on your powerpoint slides, you FAIL. They should be used SPARINGLY and OCCASIONALLY, and really should only be necessary for presenting multimedia things that you’d have no way of introducing otherwise. Maybe in a few places they could be used to outline some basic diagrams or bulletpoints. You should NOT be just standing there and reading off your slides.

And is it just me or were those slides a one-way ticket to slumberland? Something about the lights off, monotonous slides, and lazy professor just put me right to sleep.

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The last one’s my favorite.

… and an enemy of PowerPoint, is featured, along with other anti-PPers, in a Wall Street Journal piece.

Excerpts:

… José Bowen, a SourPointer who serves as dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of the Arts… is a jazz musician who has played with Dizzy Gillespie and written for Jerry Garcia. So he knows performance. And he insists that PowerPoint undermines it, serving as a crutch for professors and lulling students into boredom and passivity. He encourages his SMU colleagues not to use the program in lectures—to “teach naked,” as he says.

T.X. Hammes brings a quite different background to the ranks of the SourPointers. A retired colonel in the Marine Corps and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, Col. Hammes wrote in this month’s Armed Forces Journal that PowerPoint “is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making.”

In the Defense Department and military, he writes, the agenda is driven by vague, oversimplified and easily misunderstood bullet points. While decision-makers once read and slept on “succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues,” today they are harried by PowerPoint’s pace and “are making more decisions with less preparation and less time for thought,” Col. Hammes charges.

As Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, Mr. Bowen, Col. Hammes and other SourPointers are propped on the shoulders of Edward Tufte. A design guru and former Yale University professor, Mr. Tufte travels the country giving six-hour lectures that people in advertising, programming and publishing pay hundreds of dollars to attend. Upending PowerPoint is a chief goal of his work.

Mr. Tufte’s case against PowerPoint is lengthy, detailed and not subtle. The program is evil and wasteful, he wrote in 2003—a “prankish conspiracy against evidence and thought.” On the cover of his self-published pamphlet, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” Mr. Tufte depicts Josef Stalin overlooking a large, rigid Soviet military parade and declaring “Next slide, please.”…

Tufte sent UD the Stalin poster, which you can see on the wall next to her office door.

… as the Cowardly Lion sings…

If I were king, enlightened deans would see that most instances of PowerPoint use in the classroom are lazy and irresponsible and even inhuman. They would understand that PowerPoint breeds a robotic remoteness and simple-mindedness in professors that in turn breeds boredom in students. These deans would firmly discourage their teaching staff from using PowerPoint.

Dream on, you fool!

… And yet…

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He’s not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The survey consisted of 211 students at a university in England and was conducted by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. “The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

But…

The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors…

Yes well. You know how irritable you become when you’ve been sleeping and people try to wake you up.

“[S]tudents … are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test,” says [one observer]. “Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive.”

Duh! The professor’s been socialized to be passive too, sitting there like a pointless nothing watching a movie or staring at slides along with the kiddies. What a rip-off. You’re paying a lot in tuition for your professor to warm her ass on the seat next to you. To read bullet points aloud to you like a kindergarten teacher.

UD certainly sees the benefit of PowerPoint to professor and student. Nobody has to do anything, and the only negative is that everyone’s bored out of their gourd.

But, as this enlightened dean notes, college professors are supposed to do something. So are college students.

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UD thanks Bill for the link.