Rethinking The Design Of Presentation Slides

The new presentation slide goes up in class, and the students immediately give it their attention. Do the students quickly grasp the main assertion of the slide? Does the slide actually help students understand and retain the material? If the slide is posted as part of a set of notes, do the students understand it two weeks later? In the past decade, presentation slides have become a common addition to the teaching of technical subjects. Ideally, these slides can emphasize key points, can show images too complex to explain in words, and can reveal the organization of the presentation. In addition, well designed slides can increase the retention of the audience from 10 percent, for just hearing, to 50 percent for both hearing and seeing the material [1]. However, are the designs that most engineering instructors use, and that programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint offer as defaults, the most effective at communicating technical information? This paper argues that they are not.