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The Death of PP

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Clarissa

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I’m going to be teaching a course in a different discipline in the spring. I asked the person who is currently teaching it for the syllabus so that I can see what the course normally looks like. I was absolutely stunned to find out that she requires students to make a PowerPoint presentation and even specifies the number of slides.

Making PowerPoint slides is no longer a marketable skill. No human being ever needs to make another PowerPoint again. Assigning 15% of the final grade for something that every student who is not a clinical moron will outsource to AI is insane.

Forget AI. I explicitly started prohibiting students from using PowerPoints for presentations in my courses back in 2014 or 2015.

People are paying for this education. They need to get some value out of it. This is not offering value.

5 responses to “The Death of PP”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Making PowerPoint slides is no longer a marketable skill”

    Was it ever? It’s a cludgy tool at best and very limited in what it can do…. it’s main purpose might be the little effects that some people like to use to dry to distract them from the boring speaker….

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  2. v07 Avatar
    v07

    Interesting…

    I understand that in the field of languages and literatures the main point of the presentations may be the speech of the speaker. But in other fields there may be much more need to show graphs, formulas, experimental data, etc. And I would not trust AI to make my visual presentations (with PP or any other software) instead of me… Or to introduce fun content aimed at waking people up every now and then. 🙂

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    She also DID NOT TEACH. The class was making 2 PowerPoints for the semester, presenting, then answering 10 common sense questions on a online quiz. Waste of my moeny.

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    1. v07 Avatar
      v07

      —She also DID NOT TEACH

      and this is a much bigger problem than PowerPoint…

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Admittedly, the content of the course by the PP professor is even more disturbing. The message of the course is that everybody should be a global citizen, rah rah.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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