A lot of emphasis in education, especially in recent times, has shifted to concerns about quality. An obstacle in the way of quality education is poor teaching, especially at private-sector universities.
It is generally agreed that quality education is not possible without good teachers. However, some universities fail to recruit good teachers. This happens mostly because teaching ability and competence are ignored at the time of recruitment. There is no way one can then expect that students’ learning outcomes would not be affected.
Many university teachers lack the ability to deliver effective lectures. Most of them choose to mask the weakness by using Power Point. The problem is, if you cannot plan a good lecture, you cannot design a great Power Point presentation either. The Power Present presentations designed by such teachers tend to miss some of the important aspects of the subject.
Competent teachers have a big role in the academic achievement of their students. Unfortunately, teaching ability and competence are sometimes not taken into account at the time of their recruitment, especially in private universities.
Teaching ability and competence are ignored in recruitment of faculty, especially in private universities
This allows people having poor communication skills to be hired. Such teachers are unable to help their students. Many cannot even speak for an hour and half at a stretch. As a coping mechanism, they adopt teaching techniques that affect students’ learning.
There is an over-reliance on technology. Many teachers deliver their lectures using Power Point and multimedia. This places an additional burden on students and discourages critical thinking. The environment promotes laziness in students who stop taking notes believing that they can always get copies of the slides. Such students end up missing a lot of the content. Most of the time the teachers are simply reading from the slides and the students cannot give their feedback or participate. Such Power Point presentations tend to make the students dull. Some of the teachers read the slides like newspaper headlines or storybooks.
Universities should ban Power Point, if for no other reason then because as it creates dependence and laziness among teachers and encourages students to follow a bad pattern.
It is hard to understand why so many teachers deliver whole lectures using Power Point despite realising that this is not an effective way of learning. A good teacher would never do that.
Power Point-based lectures have many disadvantages. The first and foremost is the fact that they do not allow the students to use their critical thinking faculties. The disadvantages of Power Point presentations include: a greater chance of giving irrelevant information that distracts the students; lack of room of spontaneous interaction with students turning the lecture into a speech; the pace giving little chance to students to participate; and the fact that teachers follow the order of concepts in slides so strictly that it affects comprehension.
Universities can improve the quality of education by stopping teachers from using Power Point presentations.
To improve the standard of education and produce students with critical thinking, universities should ban Power Point or rethink methods in which instructors design their slides and the ways in which these presentations are delivered.
The writer is a PhD scholar at the University of Sydney, Australia