Mortality Audit: ‘Death’ by Power Point.

 

In the year of 2000, gone were the chalks, whiteboards and overhead projectors. Lectures and business presentations were overtaken by PowerPoint presentation. While PowerPoint is designed to assist communication, it is not meant to take away the role of the presenter. Nonetheless, what is happening in most settings is we put our script on the slides and talk to the screen. This global phenomenon has led to the emergence of the new lexicon; Death by PowerPoint.

 

As PowerPoint is closely related to lecturing, we dedicated this issue to Lecture: Rest in Peace? We aimed to provide balanced arguments on the pro and cons of the current mode of lecturing using power points and how can we improve according to the evidence. In this issue, we are privileged to have our recently graduated PhD student, Dr Siti Nurma Hanim Hadie to share her findings on effective lecturing. 

 

Contrary to the common scenes, PowerPoint shouldn’t be created to be self-explanatory. It should be closely ‘tagged’ to the presenter’s commentary (Harden, 2008). Evidence has shown that students who look at graphics while listening to verbal text learned significantly better than those who read printed text and graphics (Lee & Bowers, 1997). Therefore in this issue, we also feature the Cognitive Theory in Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2005) key principles for the readers to understand the rationale of reforming our ‘reading PowerPoint practices’.

 

Ronald Harden, the distinguished Guru of Medical Education has proposed several ways to improve this. One example, when we are preparing for a lecture, forgets about the PowerPoint first. Think of the audience, key messages that we would like to deliver, strategies to adopt and structure of the lecture. Only then, we would think of how we can utilize Power Point to harness the message delivery. As teaching is not an ‘innate gift’ (McLean et al, 2008), Harden also proposed faculty development and microteaching to empower educators (Harden, 2008).

 

Let us embrace this challenge to improve our students learning experience. And putting an end to variously described lexicon that is making their way to ICD-10 – PowerPoints Phobia, Power Pointptosis and a form of depression called PowerPointlessness. ea