PowerPoint Karaoke, which UD has covered on this blog in the past, moves to Canada.

Here’s a new teaching technique: Just use your predecessor’s PowerPoints. No muss, no fuss.

A professor is embroiled in a row with his former employer after teaching materials he designed were replicated by a successor when his contract came to an end.

Newcastle University admitted that the lecturer who replaced Donald Weetman had “drawn on” his slides, over which he believed he held copyright, without acknowledgement. However, it insisted that this was not a breach of copyright.

In 2007, Professor Weetman, a retired professor of pharmacology at the University of Sunderland, was employed by Newcastle on a short-term rolling contract. There he redesigned a final-year BSc biomedical sciences module.

He said the course had not previously been updated since 1999.

“The module I designed was very different from that delivered earlier,” he said. “As I had put considerable effort into the revision, I sought to protect it by making it a condition of the temporary contract that I retain copyright of my teaching materials, including PowerPoint slides.”

In an email to the course supervisor during negotiations on the contract, he wrote: “I would be unhappy if anybody … used the slides in subsequent years in an attempt to run the course … By retaining copyright, this will not occur.”

The professor said this was agreed to verbally: however, no reference to copyright was made in his contract or the conditions of service on Newcastle’s website. The contract was renewed in 2008 but not in 2009, when Professor Weetman was replaced by a newly appointed teaching Fellow.

When he checked the new lecturer’s PowerPoint slides on the university’s website, Professor Weetman said he found that his “concepts and many of the individual slides” were still in use, “including the wholesale transmission of uncorrected typos”.

He also claimed that the “concept” of the course, which tracked the commercial development of a drug into a medicine, was identical to his own…

Let the PowerPointer beware. Now that university education is about shooting bullet points at students, you shouldn’t expect anyone to respect your particular bullet points.

But take heart. Cases like yours will soon be a thing of the past. Universally downloadable Pps will make classroom professors redundant, including your replacement. Newcastle will not long from now be an exclusively online institution.

University students are finally getting angry about PowerPoint. It’s about time.

Today, it’s the University of California at Irvine. Here’s a really good editorial from their newspaper:

You’re on Facebook. You’re also in class. Your eyes flicker from screen to screen. Your neighbor is playing Minesweeper. The girl in front of you is checking the sales at Urban Outfitters. You struggle to pay attention to the lecture, which has been condensed into bullet points projected overhead. The professor reads directly off the screen, which has itself been copied straight from the textbook. She seems as bored as the rest of the class.

Unfortunately, this scenario has become increasingly commonplace in university classes. While technological advances have enhanced the educational experience, technology overkill threatens it. Perhaps we’re headed to that point of no return: former technological tools are becoming foundations.

Take, for instance, PowerPoint. This slideshow program started out as an impressive medium for presentations. Ten years ago, any businessman or student could guarantee his or her project’s success simply by adding a flashy PowerPoint, complete with sound effects and star wipes. However, in the past several years, nearly everyone – at any age, any level of education – has learned how to use this once-intimidating program.

The result? PowerPoint has flooded every field, used for “easy” communication when clearer communication may be desired instead. We can see this happening in our classrooms, as professors increasingly rely on their slides to make their point for them. Distressingly, this is happening elsewhere – and in more places than you might think.

The military has used this tool for a while, but according to a recent piece by the New York Times, every briefing, no matter how complicated or short, has been conducted almost entirely with PowerPoint. “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster told the New York Times. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

We may feel the same frustration as we sit in our overflowing lecture halls, led through complex ideas only by the light of the silvery PowerPoint slides. With PowerPoint, both teacher and student can switch to auto-pilot. Why bother taking notes if you can check the PowerPoints online later?

PowerPoint not only creates the illusion of control, but also the illusion of saving time and energy. In that same New York Times report, a captain guessed that he spent an hour a day preparing PowerPoint slides for military briefs. Professors who are newly dependent on PowerPoint may find themselves devoting a large part of their week to preparing their slides, perhaps assuring themselves that they’ll use the same ones next quarter. But requirements and coursework keep shifting, and professors keep returning to their slides to update, shift and edit.

In class, PowerPoints prove to be further counter-productive. The teacher can click through the slides, the students can skim them, and both of them can be in other places at once. Like, say, musing about their current research outside of the classroom, or clicking through endless photos of the weekend’s parties on Facebook.

Of course, while attending a prestigious research university like UC Irvine has many benefits, the focus on research can distract from actual teaching. Unfortunately, many professors may be more involved with their research and working with graduate students than teaching their undergraduate classes.

Tools like PowerPoint may seem like the ultimate salvation for the busy professor (or teacher, as more and more high schools start to adopt a similar lecturing style). It’s a shame that the brightly colored slides are obnoxious and reductive, leaving many students with a shallow understanding of the reading material. True, students are supposed to be doing the supplementary reading outside of class, but who can focus on anything that’s on a physical page? And why bother? PowerPoints trick us in another way: both the presenter and his/her audience are left with the illusion of understanding.

Ultimately, the best way to teach is on a more individual basis, with a teacher pontificating to rows of students, and not a single flickering screen. Students crave real interaction, and professors do too. In fact, the real culprit here may not be technology so much as the ballooning sizes of classrooms. A PowerPoint show would look awkward in a room of five people, and rightly so. The bullet points should be in the professors’ hands and traveling through students’ pens, with enough room in-between to incorporate discussion notes.

PowerPoint is also admittedly useful for more technical classes, where a professor might waste valuable class time with drawing an intricate diagram or formula on the board. It’s also useful for more visual lectures, where a professor could include pictures on most of the slides to illustrate the meat of his/her lecture.

However, we could all agree that, despite these allowances, PowerPoint – and technology in general – needs to be used in moderation. That includes you, students who complain about your professor’s reliance on PowerPoint slides. Get off Facebook already, and pay attention to your (increasingly expensive) university lecture.

Truly, technology giveth and it taketh away.

————————————————————-

PowerPoint:

• Obnoxious

• Reductive.

• Students left with shallow understanding.

———————————————————–

(That New York Times piece – and the over seven hundred mostly anti-PowerPoint comments it attracted – seems to have opened the floodgates. Everyone’s citing it.)

Sing it, sister.

It’s a common experience – a dimly lit classroom, the low hum of the projector, and the soft glow of yet another bulleted list on the screen.

Eyes grow heavy. The professor stands motionless, ensconced behind a podium and laptop. Attention fades.

Across our great University, PowerPoint has become a crutch for teaching rather than a tool for learning. With more and more technology migrating into classrooms and students seeking an easy lecture crib sheet, these presentations have come to lead lectures rather than augment them.

Students recognize that the best professors make subjects come alive with interesting lectures, open discussion, and critical questioning. No teacher has ever derived effectiveness solely from sleek slides with cheesy fade effects. At its heart, much of education needs little more than a teacher, some chairs, and perhaps a book.

The New York Times recently covered a conference earlier this month in North Carolina where military leaders spoke openly of the hazard posed by dependence on the ubiquitous PowerPoints. Brigadier General H.R. McMaster warned that “it’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding, the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

And therein lays the crux of the problem. When lectures are molded to fit the constraints of PowerPoint, learning is compromised and subjects become pasteurized, homogenized, and intellectually boring. Abandoning this crutch will enhance learning and create more opportunities to practice extemporaneous public speaking with probing questions and answers. These skills challenge students to become better listeners and thinkers — qualities that are of critical importance in today’s increasingly complex world.

Extemporaneous public speaking with probing questions and answers. Sounds like teaching!

… banning laptops. I link to it only because I link to all of these things.

Oh, wait. There is one wonderful moment in it. A comment from a student explaining one instance of laptop use:

I went through a history class that was just every single day death by PowerPoint. And it just, it was awful.

It’s technology v. technology: An asshole in front of the room is too lazy to teach and students are too afraid or indifferent to protest. So students find their own defensive technology in response to the situation.

The result is what UD has called the Morgue Classroom, or TPD: Total Pedagogical Death.

*****************************************

By the way, some American university students have formally protested excessive or inept faculty PowerPoint use at a number of campuses.

… why the thrill is gone.

… [M]ost of [my education here] revolves around manipulating the system to my advantage: learning the art of answering multiple choice questions, or when I can zone out during PowerPoint presentations. Discerning what the professor cares about and will probably put on the midterm, while ignoring the rest.

… I believe that the problem itself lies in the structure of Cal’s undergraduate program. Conducted in large auditoriums, much teaching is based mostly on lectures in which a professor simply transfers his or her ideas to the students. Even if you’re lucky enough to get into a good discussion section, there is still inadequate time allotted for student-generated discussions or ideas.

… Which has made me realize that, in the midst of heightened student activism and concern for California’s educational system, we need to expand the list of things that we are fighting for. That we should focus not only on budget cuts and the privatization of public education but on how we are educated as well: on our right to intellectual curiosity, critical thinking and the opportunity to pursue the passions that brought us to Berkeley in the first place…

From a review of Professor Untat, a new book by Uwe Kamenz and Martin Werle:

…. [P]rofessors [in Germany] have an extreme form of tenure, so that for them, unemployment simply does not exist. There are also no real controls within the system, so they are left very much to their own devices.

The result, the authors argue, is that only a third of the large body of German professors work hard and with integrity, while about a fifth abuse the system to the limit.

[They get] their doctoral students to do a large proportion of their teaching and administration, and most or even all of their research, while still passing themselves off as the authors.

… These beleaguered doctoral students work incredibly long hours on all manner of activities and projects. They often have little time during the week to work on their own doctorates, and receive little in the way of supervision.

All of this is possible because professors in German academia are in a position of total power over their doctoral students – and because the latter desperately want to earn their degrees.

Some of the activities described in Professor Untat take some beating. On the teaching front, professors block their courses so that they need to be on campus only two or three days a week – during semesters, that is.

Furthermore, “lectures” often comprise little more than PowerPoint presentations prepared by doctoral students. In such cases, the latter inevitably are more in command of the material than the academics who present it.

In the worst cases, sabbaticals are used either for extended holidays or to engage in lucrative consultancy work…

… from a Stanford student:

A real teacher engages [her] students and challenges [them] to engage with course material. A real teacher pulls from students strands of potential and forces students to use their abilities in order to grow intellectually. And at Stanford? Eh, many Stanford professors don’t teach as much as they speak at you, read off of Powerpoint slides, or boast about their various accolades. Come to Stanford and you may get a few memorable intellectual experiences. But know that they are rare and that the fast-paced quarter system makes them easy to avoid.

… newspaper, talks about some of the professors he’s had.

His writing is a bit awkward, but UD admires his stress on real encounters between human beings in university classrooms.

[Some] professors … are impersonal. Perhaps this is best seen in the voice of reason. If the professor poses some voice of cool logic, then they are probably ignoring your question for the sake of convenience. These are the types to stay close to their scripts, reading their power points as if power points were the last say on knowledge. Generally speaking, the bigger the class size, the more impersonal it gets.

What a rush of joy it is for these people not to have to answer real problems, real questions, real intelligence.

… Real relationships, real exchange of teaching and learning are hard to come by. The problem is facilitated by the sleeping student, the texting student and the student on Facebook during class. No one can know the authority is corrupt when they know nothing about the authority…

Hillary Reinsberg, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, reminds us that you can be highly selected, and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still get a cheesy education.

Huffington Post:

The lights go dim, eyes begin to shut and the room gets quiet. Sorry kids, if you’re looking for a story about the bedroom, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Welcome to a college lecture hall in 2010.

Too many classes begin the same way: with an often cheesy PowerPoint presentation. The professor hooks up a projector to a computer and spends ninety minutes clicking through a series of slides. In order to best see the projection, the lights are usually dimmed or shut off entirely. Blinds are closed to trap out the sunlight, making the room feel like a claustrophobic cave.

And on a Monday afternoon in a beautiful old lecture hall, I feel like I’m being pitched a product in a cheesy office sitcom. Oh, and the dark room makes me sleepy. Get me out of here!

… [P]rofessors should think of the future of the students they should hope to inspire. A generation of students accustomed to lackluster and lazy slides on a projector will enter the workforce with the idea that this is a good way to do things…

The only way these professors are going to change (it’s not a matter of their learning that what they’re doing is cheesy; they already know that) is for all of us to keep complaining. Loudly.

From a student opinion piece at Sam Houston State University:

One summer, I took a class with an especially dry subject matter. Sitting through lecture after lecture taken nearly verbatim from the chapter we were just quizzed on was absolutely numbing. What are we paying professors for if all they do is put the textbook up on PowerPoint and read it to us? Ten hours a week, wasted.

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.