There has been a recent flurry of discussion about the use of PowerPoint in college classrooms, and by extension, corporate training rooms. As far as I can tell, it started with this post from a college student discussing her frustration at instructors who use PowerPoint, with echoes on Speaker Confessions and even on Slashdot. Speaker Confessions is certainly the most amusing, primarily because it criticizes the use of bulleted lists in a bulleted list.
I certainly understand the frustration. PowerPoint has become a standard fallback for speakers, both in college and in corporate training. It is easy to put together, and easier to read from. Of course, that’s really the problem – speakers putting together (or worse, downloading from textbook publishers) densely worded PowerPoint slides and then reading them verbatim to the audience.
That’s not the way to give a presentation, in any setting. But it doesn’t mean that PowerPoint itself is a bad idea. Each instructional technology has its place, and the key to good design is to choose instructional technologies to fit training objectives. Read that again, because it’s important.
I’m betting most training designers approach this from the opposite direction. They choose PowerPoint as a medium and then try to figure out a way to say what they want to say using the tools PowerPoint provides. That is backwards and inefficient. This is also one of the reasons that web-based courses are often littered with poor design decisions: a designer says “I want to make this an online course!” without any real reason to do so.
I’ll give you a few examples of the design decisions I make, in a conveniently formatted bulleted list:
- I teach an undergraduate-level Introduction to Industrial/Organizational Psychology at ODU, and I do so entirely in PowerPoint. I do this because many concepts in I/O are hierarchical, and the layering of concepts is much clearer when presented in bulleted form – you can actually see the hierarchy of concepts, layered within one another. I put maybe 4 6-word bullets on a slide, and I spend 4 minutes per slide. That’s one minute of description and explanation per 6-word bullet. While the concept headings are on the slide, the supporting details are not. If a point is not central enough or complex enough to discuss for more than a minute, it doesn’t deserve its own bullet.
- I also teach an introductory statistics course, and I do so one-third (1/3) in PowerPoint and two-thirds (2/3) on a whiteboard. The third in PowerPoint is the first 5 weeks of class on background material, and I do so because I put together a set of colorful, animated demonstrations of abstract concepts that are difficult to explain without a visual. But after the background material is done, we get to the actual by-hand solving of mathematical equations, which is itself key to understanding why statistics function the way they do. I write and solve these problems by hand, pausing at each step to explain it, because that allows students to see my logic and reasoning as I progress through each problem. While that could be done in PowerPoint with complex custom animations, it’s simply not worth the effort – it takes less time and is clearer on the whiteboard.
- I also teach a graduate-level series on advanced concepts in personnel psychology. I use absolutely no PowerPoint or a whiteboard in either of these courses, because the key to student understanding at this stage is to talk through and process the concepts in discussion. PowerPoint oversimplifies and distracts from these discussions, so I choose not to use it. When we do have a complicated set of discussion points to go through, I will sometimes include supplementary material or outlines on paper. When I have a supplementary video or a dataset to discuss, I turn on the computer to display it, and then turn that computer off immediately afterwards.
That’s right. I teach 1) using PowerPoint, 2) using paper handouts, and/or 3) writing on a whiteboard. I choose the instructional technology best suited to the objectives I am trying to meet.
For you corporate folks, don’t let the word “instructional” throw you off – if you’re giving a presentation about anything, you’re trying to teach something to somebody. Don’t fall back on a PowerPoint presentation full of bulleted lists just because you can. Figure out what you’re trying to say first; then choose how to say it.
In a reminder to us all about the ease with which information can be sent in e-mail to unintended recipients, the sexually explicit conversation between two employees at Cornell University was “accidentally” sent campus-wide, Guest of a Guest reports and Inside Higher Ed confirms. Please note that the Guest of a Guest link includes the full conversation thread, and may not be appropriate for viewing at work. It is unclear precisely who received the naughty e-mail exchange, but it is clear than it was a much wider distribution than intended.
I say “accidentally” because the whole situation doesn’t really make any sense. Usually, these things happen because someone hits Reply All rather than Reply, and the message goes out to a larger group than intended. In this case, there was a long, established conversation thread which “somehow” was e-mailed to everyone. The only way I can see that happening is to hit Reply, and then add the listserv address for the entire campus to the e-mail. That implies some degree of purpose, although I also can’t imagine anyone wanting to share that conversation with anyone else. We’ll never really know for sure.
The situation is made somewhat worse since each employee is married – to someone else. Guest of a Guest was nice enough to censor their last names, but they did unkindly include photos of the two. The fallout from this situation, both on the side of the administration having to deal with it and the frisky e-mailers themselves, will likely be unpleasant.
What should administration do? Sexually explicit e-mailing is often against corporate and institutional e-mail policies, even if only under the heading of “for work purposes only.”
I’m also curious how such information travels and what the psychological impact is for both the ones sending and receiving this e-mail. Remember, this e-mail will negatively affect more than just those that sent it. In a traditional corporate setting, such a faux pas might be a constant distraction, triggering a loss of productivity and other counterproductive work behavior for several days as coworkers pause to gossip when they otherwise would not. I also imagine it probably be more costly to small businesses, where interpersonal relationships are often tighter, than to large ones. I wonder what research has been done thus far…
And finally, what’s the remedy to prevent this from happening again? Better training on e-mail? Better hiring practices? Both?
Neo-Academic E-Learn Vancouver Coverage: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Final
After reflecting on E-Learn 2009, I decided to post a few final thoughts about overall trends and happenings at the conference this year.
The conference is titled “World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare & Higher Education,” but once again, there was very little focus on anything outside of education. I expect this to some extent considering the sponsoring organization, but I hoped that there would be a little wider focus than there was. Aside from my own, I saw perhaps two (2) presentations that even mentioned application outside higher education. That’s really unfortunate, since education technology and HR technology applied to training are essentially the same field. I was especially looking forward to connecting with Tony Karrer, an HR technologist who was scheduled to give an invited address, but he had a sudden family situation and could not attend.
A couple of major issues jump out at me. First, little of what was presented at E-Learn was data-driven. There was a lot of qualitative research and a lot of non-research – just people sharing their personal experiences and anecdotes. It’s hard to tell if that’s specific to this conference, or if that’s a symptom of a much larger culture in education against quantifying learning. Unfortunately, the only way to demonstrate the success of a costly program to either education administrators or to corporate sponsors, and many of these programs are quite costly, is to show it has greater utility (or ROI) than alternatives. This information does not really seem to be presented by most of these folks, so it is difficult to judge the real value of many of their presentations.
Second, Second Life appeared as a much more dominant force than last year. Virtual world presentations in general were well attended, and the uses they presented were quite interesting. Stephanie Henderson-Begg presented a quantitative piece on an actual implementation of SL in several college classrooms, and I’d say it was by far the most interesting presentation I attended (see Day 3 for more detail).
Third, social networking, although a common topic of discussion, was never implemented into a course and tested for value and impact. There seemed to be, among most attendees, an assumption that “more social is better,” but there was not much evidence that this was actually true. I am examining social networking in my own research, so I was hoping to see some other evidence that I wasn’t striking out entirely into unfamiliar waters. Apparently, I am. The only rigorous research on social networking that I have ever seen has been ethnographic or investigative in nature – examination and exploration of pre-existing social networks. Building one to support corporate training appears to be an unexplored frontier.
And finally, there seems to be increasing support for blended learning – instruction that combined traditional and online techniques – without a whole lot of explanation as to what that actually means. Apparently, blended learning is great! But that’s really as much detail as I gathered.
So that’s another year of E-Learn. Overall, it was an interesting experience, and I was at least exposed to a lot of creative ideas for how to use technology, even if there was little effort on the part of presenters to evaluate them. I encourage you to read back to my summaries of previous days and form your own interpretations.