Powerpoint slides can be used to illustrate concepts, for showing relevant graphs or images, but they should not be used for a long list of bulleted points. Active learning means the classroom becomes a space for debate, discussion, interaction, and the instructor is the facilitator of all of this rather than a ‘voice from a podium’. Active learning is an important and valuable concept in higher education. Text-heavy Powerpoint slides do not promote an active learning environment. Powerpoint slides are an ineffective and rather annoying tool for the University classroom. Powerpoint is so awesome! Textbook companies provide the slides and all the material is ready to go! Clickity-click-click let’s LECTURE! Since there were more students in class, there were more questions and since there were more questions, the classroom became more interactive and as the classroom become more interactive, student engagement increased. Having students in the classroom instead of their dorm rooms produced a positive feedback loop: it created a full classroom, and an active classroom. This is because the class was always full, and it forced me to change the manner in which lectures are delivered (see above: I had to cover less material!). Sorry, this doesn’t fly either: my teaching scores have actually increased once I stopped putting notes on-line, and I’ve received countless positive comments from students about not posting slides on-line. Students are SO used to having the notes, and I’m afraid my teaching evaluations will suffer if I don’t put the notes on-line. No: covering important information in an active and integrative manner is a requirement for a University course. For some reason, instructors have in their mind that covering loads of material is a requirement for a University course. There’s a serious disease in higher education and it’s called “ Information Overload Disorder”. If students are scrambling to write stuff down, this means “slow down”, it doesn’t mean “post your lectures on-line”. This merely indicates that the instructor is going too quickly over the material, or that too much material is being covered. Students argue that having lectures on-line facilitates their learning: instead of concentrating on the lectures and the content, students have to scramble to write things done. Here are some of the arguments for posting Powerpoint slides on-line, and my rebuttals: OK, I admit I’ll get some flak from that statement. The solution is simple: STOP posting Powerpoint slides on-line! I was a 20 year-old undergraduate once, and if I was able to get all the lecture material by logging on and clicking ‘download’, it would certainly make it easy to skip class! If lectures are posted on-line, I’m not surprised that students aren’t going to lecture. One of the key issues is that instructors are getting into the habit of spoon-feeding students by placing lectures on-line. In other words, perhaps this is the fault of the instructor rather than the student. It means the traditional lecture format needs a serious overhaul. In my opinion, this is a signal that something is wrong with how the material is delivered rather than being indicative of some deeper issue. I tire of the belly-aching about how students don’t show up to lectures anymore (the latest example of this is mentioned here).
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