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Latest News |
| 18th
Sep 2010 / Times of India / Mumbai Edition |
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NO SPONTANEITY IN LECTURES
Learning lost in PowerPoint, say med students
Mumbai: PowerPoint presentations may be a common form
of teaching in any classroom, but students in civic medical
colleges are not happy with them. They complain that the
technology has robbed them of the real joy of learning
and that overworked lecturers simply read out from slides,
many of which are downloaded from the internet.
A section of students had recently voiced their anguish
in front of a Medical Council of India (MCI) representative
that lectures lack spontaneity as teachers just read out
the slides. A first-year MBBS student from the GS Seth
Medical College said that animations with medical diagrams
and multiple slides only add to their confusion. Most
of the time, the content is lost in pictures and slides,
said the student, who did not wish to be identified.
A lecturer from Sion hospital made an interesting observation.
Given the patient load in public hospitals, there is very
little time to put our thoughts in the PowerPoint presentations,
he said. I know of many who download it from the internet
even if the content is not very relevant to our medical
scenario, and students may not be completely wrong in
disliking this mode of teaching, he said, quickly adding
that he believes in teaching without any audio-visual
aid.
MCIs member of board of governors Ranjit Roy Chaudhury
said that he was aware of the misuse of this technology.
It is a good technology but is being misused, he said.
He, too, felt that on several occasions, teachers seldom
put their thoughts in their teaching. Instead of giving
a stimulating teaching experience, they just put some
form of information on slides. This cannot be called teaching,
he said.
Roy Chaudhury clarified that nowhere in the medical curriculum
of 300-medical colleges was it compulsory for teachers
to employ audio or visual teaching aids. We do not specify
any such thing, he said, lamenting that it is a technique
which could have been used well.
A senior teacher from KEM Hospital, too, agreed with the
students. PowerPoint slides are originally meant for business
presentations, so when used for active teaching, it obviously
defeats the purpose, said the professor with a teaching
experience of 12 years. Students tend to become passive
audience in the classroom and just wait for the class
to get over, she added.
A PowerPoint presentation contains 45-50 words in one
slide. So, students say that the entire lecture gets divided
into several slides, bullet points and pictures. And,
the slides, too, are overloaded with information adding
to the confusion of students. We are not asking for complete
deletion of Power-Point from classrooms but a little more
thinking in making those slides, said a student of Nair
Dental College.
Director of medical education Dr Sanjay Oak said Power-Point
should always be combined with a gripping lecture. Audiovisual
aids should supplement teaching, he said, adding that
there cannot be any substitute to a good oratory lecture.
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