As I do every semester in my course The Digital Past, yesterday I asked my students what drives them crazy about how their faculty members use PowerPoint and other slideware in class. Herewith, their litany of complaint:
- The inclusion of random slides that don’t seem to pertain to what the professor is discussing
- Slides with links that then don’t get followed
- Shared slides with links that are broken
- Professors standing in front of the screen and reading the text on their slides
- Graphics that aren’t, or are not sufficiently, explained
- Graphics that are so small you can’t make sense of the data on them
- Slides that are out of order and the professor jumps up and down the sequence trying to find the one he/she wants to show
- Too many slides (One student said she had a one hour lecture with 65 slides. Really?)
- Too much text on the slides, or alternatively, a slide with just one bullet
- Bizarre color choices (One student had a class that was all red text on a black background. Yikes!)
- Bizarre font choices, or fonts that don’t fit with the topic at hand
- Uncorrected slides — “Oops, I made an error there, let me take a few minutes to fix it while you watch.”
- Slides that mimic or simply copy what is in the textbook
- Professors who move way too quickly through their slides, especially at the end of class
- Slides that are not used to generate discussion or thinking — are seemingly there for informational purposes only
- Slides that are not posted or shared with students
- Seemingly random photographs
- Slides with seemingly random information
- Slides with typos in the text
So, dear colleague, be warned that if you do any of these things when using slideware in your classes, you are probably annoying the hell out of your students.