Powerpoint: Pizzazz, Pathos, and Pedagogy

PowerPoint offers an innovative tool introduced in 1990 to assist presentations.  It has quickly became adopted as the tool of choice for all presentations, be they the board room, the military, or education. With easy graphics, animations, pre-designed templates, and its ubiquity, it seems like a no-brainer to include PowerPoint presentation in you course.  However, a closer look at the adoption of PowerPoint presentations reviews there can be some serious caveats.   Like a chainsaw, PowerPoint is a tool that can be used under certain can be very productive, and when misused can be devastating.

There are two distinct ways to use PowerPoint in education.  First it can be a presentation tool and second it can be used for online learning. While there are similarities in both, these two categories have unique issues.

Classroom and Critical Failures

 As such instructors can utilize it in the classroom to augment their classes.  Often this devolves into a sub-par teaching environment.  This does so for the following reasons:

• PowerPoints Failings
• Poor Usage
• Discouraging Active Learning

PowerPoints Failings
PowerPoint began as a tool to help convey a message and often becomes the tool that influences the message.  PowerPoint offers templates and encourages information to be presented with bullet points. However, it is not clear that complex relationships can be easily represented with bullets.   Further, the templates can detract from visual pedagogy and organizing information that fosters learning (Tufte, 2003)

This should be taken seriously.  In the early 2000s most military briefings soon devolved into charts, graphs and images where the meaning was opaque at best and meaningless at worst (Bumiller, 2010).   Taking a look at the above header image can give your insight as to the degree of absurdity some slides became. It also explains why researchers can show that PowerPoint has little use as a memory aid (Kidd, 1994)

Above: A slide from a Department of Defense Powerpoint briefing.  See how clear this is? It is no wonder the key concepts were not understood in less than five minutes of presentation time.

Poor Usage  
It is not that all PowerPoint presentations are worthless, but instead that most people putting them together have without any knowledge of effective practices, instructional design principles, and learning theory. The result often becomes a clutters presentations with slides that have too much content and are presented ineffectively.

If you are going to use PowerPoint to augment your lecture, you should use it effectively.   A few key rules are:

1. One message per slide – and use imagery to promote this message
2. Remember the working memory/ redundancy effect. Text sentences and the same audio played at the same time reduce memory of message.  Instead, only use a key word or, better yet, an image.   Using an image helps significantly improve the chances of the learner remembering the message (Sweller, 1999)
3. In general, humans focus on:
   1. Motion (do not add meaningless motion, it distracts)
   2.  Contrasting objects, consider bring up the contrast on what matters.
   3. Warning colors (red or yellow gain our attention – be sure it is focused wisely)
   4. Size  (The largest item is the most important)
4. Apply contrast on area of importance.  Do not have too bright background with light background.  Get focus on presenter.
5. Cognitive load theory applies. The number of items on a slide should be 4-6 during a difficult presentation.  Seven should be your top number as there is more cognitive effort spend on processing the extra information.   Anything after this should be reconsidered. Visually people can instantly process 6 or less images with significantly less cognitive stress 

Further you are the focus – NOT the PowerPoint.   Do not read the slide.  It demonstrates that you do not know the material to the listeners.  It also encourages them to not pay attention as chances are that they can read the slide faster than you can read it out loud. Remember, when presenting the most important thing is the presenter and their knowledge.  Demonstrate this by not simply reading a slide.

Finally consider ADA standards.  For example, if your color schema does not meet with these standards and there is not enough contrast between background and text that would be acceptable in another medium, then do not to it in PowerPoint.


Passive Learning
All to often instructors rely on presenting the material in front of the students without illustrating the context of the material, what it means, and engaging the students.  Students become receptacles of the information in the slides.  This is information that they will statistically forget shortly after the class because the class was not engaging.

Often these less than stellar presentations are freely downloaded from publishers and used by faculty.  While this is information that is easy to obtain, it also undermines your legitimacy to most students and encourages them to tune out.

One can suggest that the using the PowerPoint is a good study guide for the students.  This is not the case.  Research shows that these presentations offer little as a memory aid (Kidd, 1994; Whittaker & Hirschber, 2003).  The act of focused note taking improves the learners ability to recall the content (Kalnikaite & Whittaker, 2007).  Further having students print out the PowerPoint files uses a lot of paper, incurring campus costs, with no evidence that this is effective.  Anecdotally, students feel frustration from the long and unengaging presentation (Grabill, 2009).

This is not to say that PowerPoint cannot be effective, but rather that how it is used and the medium employed makes a difference.

Online Uses

 Clearly without the presenter, they audio is lacking from the presentation.  Often individuals suggest that this is why their slides have to be font loaded with text.  This is not the case.  Overall classroom PowerPoints should not be placed into an LMS and be referred to as online learning.  Online classes need to be more than merely reading text.  They should be engaging.

Technological Shortcoming and Engagement

 In Blackboard, and other LMSs, PowerPoint files are uploaded and then downloaded by students.  This second step takes them outside of the LMS and acts as another barrier that separates the student from the class.  Statistically you will lose some students attention and they will most likely never get around to looking at the file.

If the text is important to the course, it is not clear why a content page in HTML could not be used.  This could harness several of the advantages of the web as well.  One of these advantages could be to use an alternative, such as Google Slides, and embed the presentation in line.   This will allow the students to view the presentation without leaving the LMS.

Also, is PowerPoint the best way of presenting the material?   At this point there are other web programs that can make the material more interactive, such as Prezi.  The presentation could also be a video where the audio of the lecture could be augmented with images for maximum effect.

Before loading up another PowerPoint file, you might consider another option.

References

Bumiller, Elisabeth (2010) We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

Grabill, Carolyn (2009) Why learning from PowerPoint lectures is frustrating  Carolyn Works, http://blog.carolynworks.com/?p=154

Kalnikaite, Vaiva & Steve Whittaker, 2007 Does taking motes help you remember better? Exploring how note taking relates to memory. Supporting Human Memory with Interactive Systems, HCL Conference, Sept 4, Lancaster, UK  http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/lalanned/MeMos07/files/kalnikaite.pdf

Kidd A. (1994) The marks are on the knowledge worker. In Proc. CHI94, ACM Press, 186-191

Landay J.A., Kaugmann T.R. User Interface Issues in Mobile Computing. In Proc. WWOS-IV 1993, IEEE Press (1993), 40-47)

Scivally, Andrew (2012) 10 Online Training Do’s and Don’ts. ELearning Brothers http://elearningbrothers.com/ten-online-training-dos-and-donts/

Sweller, John (1999) Visualization and instruction design, Australian Educational Review

Tufte, Edward (2003) PowerPoint is evil, Wired https://www.wired.com/2003/09/ppt2/

Whittaker S.&  Hirschberg J (2003) Look or Listen: Discovering Effective Techniques for Accessing Speech Data. In Proc. CHI98. Springer-Verlag, 253-269