Power Point in today’s university’s education

Hongxing Zhao
Dept. of Genetics and Pathology

Summary
PowerPoint has been offering a great advantage in
today’s teaching and presentation. In order to know how and
how much PowerPoint effect today’s university education, I
attended several class lessons for undergraduate students. In
addition, I also interviewed students and teachers at different
levels and asked their opinions about PowerPoint. My study
showed that PowerPoint, since its first use, has become a well
accepted and wildly used tool for university education.

Introduction

PowerPoint (full name Microsoft Office PowerPoint) is a presentation program

developed for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS computer operating systems. It is
used for classroom lessons, sales presentations, training sessions, and any situation in
which information is presented to groups of people. PowerPoint allows you to place your
content into a presentation, a series of "slides" which can then be projected for an
audience, printed and distributed as handouts, published on the internet or used in
numerous other ways. It is also a multimedia application, meaning that you can add text,
various types of images, sound and even video clips to your presentation to help engage
your audience. It was originally written by Bob Gaskins and Dennis Austin in 1984.
PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh, whereas the first
Windows versions were produced in 1990. Since then PowerPoint has been undergone a
dramatically improvement and today, it has become a most powerful tool and widely
used for nearly all kind of presentations. According to its seller, Microsoft Corporation,
some 30 million presentations are made with PowerPoint every day.

However, there are many criticisms of the use of PowerPoint in education. One
major source of criticism comes from Edward Tufte, professor of statistics and graphic
design in Yale. In his essay “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”, he criticizes many
emergent properties of the software:

• Its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
• Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of
computer displays;
• The outliner causing ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy,
itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
• Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy ;
• Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and
who use poorly-designed templates and default settings;
 • Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with
beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely
disguised points. This may present a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality
that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".

David Beatty, management professor from University of Toronto describe:

"PowerPoint is like a disease. It's the AIDS of management." He advises spending 85
percent of one's time on figuring out what to say, and only 15 percent on how. Peter
Norvig created a PowerPoint version of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as an
ironic example of the presentation style often associated with PowerPoint. Notes
Crispen pointed out that, "The primary goal of any classroom PowerPoint
presentation isn't to entertain, but rather to teach."

Most people think PowerPoint is not the problem, but rather the bad presenter.
The expression "death by PowerPoint" has become popular for describing poor
presentations. "Death by PowerPoint" does not necessarily mean that the presentation
itself is boring; the problem could lie with the presenter. Examples of "death by
PowerPoint" include:

• Unnecessarily long presentations.

• A presenter who simply reads off the slides in a monotonous tone.
• A PowerPoint presentation with plain text and no graphics or animations.
• Conversely, a presentation ridiculously heavy with custom animations for
every text.
• Pages cluttered with small, unreadable text.

Should we use PowerPoint at all? If so, when and how? It is very important to
know whether PowerPoint slideshows will help students to learn, or hinder them. Here I
report an investigation of the use of PowerPoint in a class and how students and teachers
at all level think about PowerPoint in university’s education.

Investigation
I have attended some class lessons of the course “Molecular virology” given by
the Dept. of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, Biomedical Center, Uppsala
University. Participates of this course are 2nd or 3rd year undergraduate students. I
observed how lecture were conducted and how PowerPoint presentation were used. I also
discussed about PowerPoint presentation with students and teachers after class. In
addition I asked them to fill in an investigation form with general questions about
PowerPoint (as shown below). Six undergraduate students and two professors from this
course were invited for this investigation. Finally, I also surveyed six graduate students
and six postdoc from our department with the same questions.

(1) How many lecture/Seminar you attend are presented by using PowerPoint presentation
100%
75%
 50%
less than 50%
(2) Do you think PowerPoint presentation is the best way to use for presentation
best tools for presentation
ok to use
worst tools for presentation
(3) Is PowerPoint presentation a best tool for
all kind of presentation
only seminar
only lecture
teaching
not good in any these case
(4) What is the major advantage of using Powerpoint presentation
presentations can be ease of use, updated or rearranged, right to the last minute
improves the visibility of content and materials for students in large classes
print outlines or snapshots of the slides with room to take notes for the students
can be used to stimulate discussion
other
(5) What is the major disadvantage of using Powerpoint presentation
it is teacher-centered: it puts the instructor at the center of the action, promoting passivity on the part of
students.
two much information
often poor typography and chart layout
simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and
end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points.
other

Results

1. PowerPoint is mostly used in university teaching

In order to obtain direct information, I have attended four classes given by four
teachers: three professors and one docent of age between 40 to 60. All of them are very
experienced teacher, and they usually give the same lecture more than twice a year. Two
of them used PowerPoint presentation entirely in their teaching. They prepared very good
slides and spent time to explain them. Of course, they also used other teaching method,
such as using example, periodic summaries, posing questions, etc. The third professor use
overheads which were generated using PowerPoint and the fourth one used very few
overhead and whiteboard. Handouts were given to the students before each lecture in the
cases when PowerPoint was used for producing slides. It is very crucial to give the
handouts to the students before the class. I think these lectures gave quite similar result
regardless if the slides or overheads were prepared in PowerPoint or not, since these
teachers are very experienced and skilled. Students were positive about the lectures. Of
course, PowerPoint has a great power, in the sense of better visibility and beautiful
pictures that, for sure, will enhance the teaching.

2. PowerPoint is mostly used tool for all type of presentations in university

To investigate the use of the PowerPoint in various activities and identify advantages
and disadvantages, I handed out a questionnaire to 20 people including undergraduate
student, graduate students, postdocs and professors. The results as following:

• To question 1: How many lecture/Seminar you attend are presented by using

PowerPoint presentation
a. all undergraduate students chose 75%,
b.whereas half of graduate students’ answer was 75% and other was
100%.
c. all postdoc and professors’ answer was 100%.

It suggests that there are differences in the use of PowerPoint at different level of
education. Other methods than PowerPoint is also used in teaching for
undergraduate students. Postdocs mostly attend seminars and research lectures,
and these are always given by PowerPoint.

• To question 2: Do you think PowerPoint presentation is the best way to use for
presentation? Two third chose the first answer and rest selected “it is ok to
use”.
• To question 3 is about whether PowerPoint presentation a best tool for
everything. Only three selected “all kind of presentation”, whereas most think
it is not the best for teaching.
• To question 4 is about advantage of PowerPoint, most people agree that
PowerPoint offer a great possibility for preparing slides, it also improves the
visibility of content and materials.
• To question 5 about the disadvantage: “too much information” was selected
most (over 50%).

Discussion
Although only 20 persons were involved in this investigation, they represent
different level of education or teaching experience. Undergraduate students is object of
teaching, most of their experiences are the lecture they attend. Graduate students both
attend lectures and perform some teaching acting as teaching assistant, mostly involved
in lab instruction. Postdocs is a very variable group and their individual amount of
teaching vary depending on the institute they are working, thus their teaching experience
and teaching skill could be very different. Whereas professors are very skill teachers and
have a lot of experiences. Therefore, my study, by surveying these mix groups of
people’s opinion about PowerPoint in today’s university education, can provide some
aspects about how to improve nowadays education.

To my relief, the traditional teaching manners are still used in the class, mostly
by old professors, they believe that the most important thing in teaching is to guide
students to learn by themselves, rather than giving a thoroughly lecture with every detail
and fact. Teachers should transfer their skills of learning to students, so that the students
can read books and find all the references by themselves, that is what the future needs.
Integration of technology does not mean that more traditional educational methods
become outdated; rather, technology should enhance the teaching.

It is not doubt that PowerPoint provides a great advantage in today’s university

education. However, one must consider a variety of teaching approaches when dealing
with a classroom of students and ensure that these various methods are optimally
combined according to the content of the lecture and the need of the audience. When
using PowerPoint presentation, one should consider :

• Avoid putting students in a passive mode of receiving information

• Slides should be used only when there is a need for visual aid
• Don’t present too much information, leave some part for student to learn by
themselves
• Outlines and bullets are aids to the speaker, but the speaker should use them as
cues to talk, not read, not lecture, but talk with the audience.
• Make slides simple and easy to understand.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Catharina Svensson for all the support for this project and discussion
about PowerPoint presentation. I also thank to Fredrik Granberg for discussion about
teaching course.

References

Tufte, Edward R. [2003] (November 2004). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire,
Connecticut: Graphics Press.

McKeachie W. and Svincki M (2006). McKeachie’s Teaching Tips. Houghton Mifflin.