Powerpoint Medical Education

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

enlightenedhick

Full Member
10+ Year Member
15+ Year Member
Joined
Jul 15, 2007
Messages
30
Reaction score
0
.

Members don't see this ad.
 
why do you have no books just because the lectures are done in powerpoint? we still have books....

Well, if a course is based purely on books, then you can study that (well written, reviewed, and edited) book and be fairly certain you've covered all the testable material. You can also be confident that the material might have some relevance for the boards/clinical practice.

With powerpoint based lectures, sure, you still 'have a book'. But while learning the book will give you the information you actually need, you'll probably still fail all your tests unless you learn all the (poorly written, disjointed, isolated and random) facts about 'random lecturer for the day's' research which may or may not (IT'S THE NEXT BREAKTHROUGH CURE FOR CANCER!!!!) become clinically relevant 15 years from now and almost certainly has never been heard of by the writers of USMLE. Unfortunately, passing tests is one of those hoops you have to worry about instead of worrying about actually obtaining good knowledge, if you ever want to actually practice medicine.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
So this is the modus operanti now.

How best do you learn from this?

(gut-feeling answer: just repeat until you know them verbatim :().

People b*tched about how hard medical school was before. Now with PowerPoint we really have no books. Just scratched-together lists to memorize and try to associate together.

WTF?

I never leaned any Powerpoint presentation verbatim in medical school. Medical school is about mastery of a volume/block of information which may come from text, syllabus combined with lecture. If you are doing the above, USMLE Step I is going to be your "wake-up" call.
 
Power Point is a tool. When we had chalk boards or white boards, we had to write the notes down as best we could. Now you have them at your disposal, and you just have to take down verbal notes while the prof lectures. Oh wait, many schools now record the lectures (audio and video) so you don't even have to do that. Now you'll have time to read the book.

Why does everyone bitch about having it so good? +pity+
 
Well, if a course is based purely on books, then you can study that (well written, reviewed, and edited) book and be fairly certain you've covered all the testable material. You can also be confident that the material might have some relevance for the boards/clinical practice.

With powerpoint based lectures, sure, you still 'have a book'. But while learning the book will give you the information you actually need, you'll probably still fail all your tests unless you learn all the (poorly written, disjointed, isolated and random) facts about 'random lecturer for the day's' research which may or may not (IT'S THE NEXT BREAKTHROUGH CURE FOR CANCER!!!!) become clinically relevant 15 years from now and almost certainly has never been heard of by the writers of USMLE. Unfortunately, passing tests is one of those hoops you have to worry about instead of worrying about actually obtaining good knowledge, if you ever want to actually practice medicine.

Yep, our tests are based on powerpoints and the often poorly written/organized syllabus for the class. I'd rather learn from a well-written and edited book, but you've got to know the syllabus if you want to do well on the exam.

Examples of nightmare syllabus (and powerpoint) sections -- graphs with absolutely no explanation, grammatical errors that actually affect the meaning of the text (where you put that comma changes what you're saying), and yeah, list of facts with no explanation or added content.
 
Power Point is a tool. When we had chalk boards or white boards, we had to write the notes down as best we could. Now you have them at your disposal, and you just have to take down verbal notes while the prof lectures. Oh wait, many schools now record the lectures (audio and video) so you don't even have to do that. Now you'll have time to read the book.

Why does everyone bitch about having it so good? +pity+

How old are you man? I've been getting bombarded with straight powerpoints for almost 11 or 12 years...must have experienced it sometime between now and then! :p I prefer white/chalk boards. One tends to learn better with them.

Most people do not know how to use powerpoint. That is the problem. It is really meant to be a visual tool where you put up a few key words or a phrase and talk about it...not post paragraphs of information with stupid blinking things. The impact of powerpoint comes in emphasizing what you want to say, not just doing a mind dump, so you don't need reference notes for a presentation/lecture.

(I am so excited to have escaped doing powerpoint presentations. Whenever I taught/tutored I purposely avoided it even.)
 
Well, if a course is based purely on books, then you can study that (well written, reviewed, and edited) book and be fairly certain you've covered all the testable material. You can also be confident that the material might have some relevance for the boards/clinical practice.

With powerpoint based lectures, sure, you still 'have a book'. But while learning the book will give you the information you actually need, you'll probably still fail all your tests unless you learn all the (poorly written, disjointed, isolated and random) facts about 'random lecturer for the day's' research which may or may not (IT'S THE NEXT BREAKTHROUGH CURE FOR CANCER!!!!) become clinically relevant 15 years from now and almost certainly has never been heard of by the writers of USMLE. Unfortunately, passing tests is one of those hoops you have to worry about instead of worrying about actually obtaining good knowledge, if you ever want to actually practice medicine.


couldn't have said it better myself. Not to mention that sometimes the questions on the tests themselves are written poorly, adding an extra dimension of frustration.
 
Power Point is a tool. When we had chalk boards or white boards, we had to write the notes down as best we could. Now you have them at your disposal, and you just have to take down verbal notes while the prof lectures. Oh wait, many schools now record the lectures (audio and video) so you don't even have to do that. Now you'll have time to read the book.

Why does everyone bitch about having it so good? +pity+

hey mr. class of 2011, you haven't started yet :laugh: come back to us next year and then give your commentary. :smuggrin:
 
i think what the original post was after is how to use powerpoint as a study tool... so regardless of whether you think ppt is evil:

if you are given a power point and there is a supplemental text, I would suggest reading the text and paying particular attention to topics highlighted in the power point. In our classes, most professors would not test you on something they didnt explicitly explain in class, and I found the powerpoints to be a good starting point for those would-be test questions. Reading the book just increases your understanding of the topic, and in my case anyway, the more I understand something, the more likely I am to be able to remember it on an exam.

however, some people are just not book people, and if you do better just studying the powerpoint, then that's what you should do
 
Power Point is a tool. When we had chalk boards or white boards, we had to write the notes down as best we could. Now you have them at your disposal, and you just have to take down verbal notes while the prof lectures. Oh wait, many schools now record the lectures (audio and video) so you don't even have to do that. Now you'll have time to read the book.

Why does everyone bitch about having it so good? +pity+

Geeze, get over yourself already! :rolleyes::laugh:

Hi Lifetime -
It's a little frustrating to hear someone criticize other people's attitudes when you haven't spent even a month in our shoes yet. It's not meant to tear you down, it's just frustrating.

(For the record I do agree with you - I prefer powerpoint to chalk talks. But I sympathize with other people who hate powerpoint.)

Since you haven't been in med school yet, here are some of the reasons why people hate power point, spelled out:
  • Powerpoint has to dumb things down into neat little sound bites. It's just the nature of the "tool."
  • However, in med school, most concepts are SO complicated (or require numerous steps to explain) that they really shouldn't be reduced into sound bites. It's like trying to boil down the Gettysburg Address into a 3-word sentence.
  • People often have to turn to textbooks to fill in the gaps from the lecture. Textbooks, however, rarely do a great job of explaining stuff. Plus, they often throw in excess information that slows you down. Pharm is a PRIME example of this. Katzung's textbook throws tons of numbers at you - dosages, half-lives, etc. We were explicitly told not to try to memorize that, but you have to slog through it every time you try to read the textbook.
  • Powerpoint also invites the professor to just slap a diagram up on a computer slide, without annotation or caption. That's annoying.
  • God help you if your professor is truly lazy. Then those "sound bites" that I alluded to earlier start to sound more like "text messages." Trying to learn the pathophysiology of Addison's Disease or Grave's Disease from a series of (essentially) text messages makes you want to kill yourself.
 
Hi Lifetime -
It's a little frustrating to hear someone criticize other people's attitudes when you haven't spent even a month in our shoes yet. It's not meant to tear you down, it's just frustrating.

I wasn't referring to medical school lecturers per se, but illustrating what it used to be like throughout academia versus now.

(For the record I do agree with you - I prefer powerpoint to chalk talks. But I sympathize with other people who hate powerpoint.)

Since you haven't been in med school yet, here are some of the reasons why people hate power point, spelled out:
  • Powerpoint has to dumb things down into neat little sound bites. It's just the nature of the "tool."
  • However, in med school, most concepts are SO complicated (or require numerous steps to explain) that they really shouldn't be reduced into sound bites. It's like trying to boil down the Gettysburg Address into a 3-word sentence.
  • People often have to turn to textbooks to fill in the gaps from the lecture. Textbooks, however, rarely do a great job of explaining stuff. Plus, they often throw in excess information that slows you down. Pharm is a PRIME example of this. Katzung's textbook throws tons of numbers at you - dosages, half-lives, etc. We were explicitly told not to try to memorize that, but you have to slog through it every time you try to read the textbook.
  • Powerpoint also invites the professor to just slap a diagram up on a computer slide, without annotation or caption. That's annoying.
  • God help you if your professor is truly lazy. Then those "sound bites" that I alluded to earlier start to sound more like "text messages." Trying to learn the pathophysiology of Addison's Disease or Grave's Disease from a series of (essentially) text messages makes you want to kill yourself.

This is nothing special to medical school. It's prevalent throughout academia.

I was however criticizing the medical student attitude that medical school is somehow the worst experience in academics or in life, and that outside perspectives are inferior to their own in general. You are learning a lot of material, but you aren't better than everyone else and more knowledgeable/wiser than everyone else because you are a MS whatever.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
I was however criticizing the medical student attitude that medical school is somehow the worst experience in academics or in life, and that outside perspectives are inferior to their own in general. You are learning a lot of material, but you aren't better than everyone else and more knowledgeable/wiser than everyone else because you are a MS whatever.

The topic of discussion is powerpoints in medical school, which you have not yet experienced . . . no one is saying that current medstudents are in any way superior to incoming medstudents . . . but we are more experienced in the specific medschool experience. We all understand that there are other aspects of the academic world that are challenging, but the medschool experience is a unique pain that one only truly understands once they've experienced it.

This would be like a current medstudent thinking they truly understand the pain of an intern, while we all know that its going to be rough and we know the basics of their day I'm sure that a 36 hour shift every four or five days for a year is something that can only be understood by experiencing it. I don't think a resident is better than me but they certainly know something about the experience of being a resident that I currently do not, and I certainly wouldn't judge them for whining about anything even if I didn't really get what the big deal was.
 
I was however criticizing the medical student attitude that medical school is somehow the worst experience in academics or in life, and that outside perspectives are inferior to their own in general. You are learning a lot of material, but you aren't better than everyone else and more knowledgeable/wiser than everyone else because you are a MS whatever.

No - of course we're not better or wiser. But we've been through part of med school, which makes our opinions about the experience at least somewhat valid. (Although, of course, the experience different for everyone.)

It's funny - I really liked powerpoints in undergrad. I think it was because most of the classes that used powerpoints used it to convey information that was mostly self explanatory. (Plus, I wasn't terrified of failing exams in undergrad, like I am in med school.)

But now, when you're faced with powerpoints that say unintelligible things like "DIG FAST" or "OCD PANDAS" (what?!) or just "ERV" - that's when you fire off angry emails to people that complain about how this is not worth the $40,000 tuition.
 
This is nothing special to medical school. It's prevalent throughout academia.

I was however criticizing the medical student attitude that medical school is somehow the worst experience in academics or in life, and that outside perspectives are inferior to their own in general. You are learning a lot of material, but you aren't better than everyone else and more knowledgeable/wiser than everyone else because you are a MS whatever.
It's a lot more prevalent in med school than it was for my undergrad, because most of our lecturers only have relatively brief stints teaching us, so they just have a few powerpoints. In undergrad, my first 22 credits of chemistry were on the chalkboard. Biochem was the only chem course that used powerpoint. Professors were planning the curriculum for an entire semester or year at a time, so they didn't resort to powerpoint nearly as much.

No, we're not wiser than you because we're med students, but your comments are kind of like a virgin giving sex tips. Sure, you've heard about it, but actually having experience adds a dimension to your input.
 
No, we're not wiser than you because we're med students, but your comments are kind of like a virgin giving sex tips. Sure, you've heard about it, but actually having experience adds a dimension to your input.

Best quote ever! :thumbup:
 
While it's all nice and good to say that medical school courses are something special, but they aren't. You'll find the same thing in business school, in corporate america, in higher academic circles with just as much jargon, abbreviations, and crap that people parrot back to you. It wasn't much different with acetate overhead slides run off a computer printer or photocopied from books. Whether it's medical school powerpoint, undergrad powerpoint, powerpoint in PdD programs, or at Los Alamos...you will get crap no matter depending on the presenter.
 
Powerpoint is the worst thing that could have happened to education. I had never had a power point lecture until medical school and all of them were power point. Its easy to throw up 100 slides of charts and tables and research, cover it in 1 hr, and the student is left having no idea what is important or what the big picture is.

In a tradition chalk board lecture format, there is only time for the professor to go over the big picture and what is most important in a logical sequence. Once you have an understanding this can be supplemented with text books to get more details or a different perspective.

Plus staring at a large screen in a dark room is painful for hours on end and then at home trying to study it.
 
While it's all nice and good to say that medical school courses are something special, but they aren't. You'll find the same thing in business school, in corporate america, in higher academic circles with just as much jargon, abbreviations, and crap that people parrot back to you.
The difference is that these Powerpoints are handed to us as the basis of a lecture. It'd be fine if it was just a brown-bag discussion or a corporate meeting, where you weren't going to be trying to memorize everything off the slides.
 
The difference is that these Powerpoints are handed to us as the basis of a lecture. It'd be fine if it was just a brown-bag discussion or a corporate meeting, where you weren't going to be trying to memorize everything off the slides.

Don't worry dude. In pharm next spring, everything will be in outline format and you'll have to memorize everything that way instead of PPT slides.
 
Plus staring at a large screen in a dark room is painful for hours on end and then at home trying to study it.

I thought it would be good practice for Step 1, but it wasn't. I think it lowered my eyes' tolerance for bright lights when I actually did take Step 1.

While it's all nice and good to say that medical school courses are something special, but they aren't. You'll find the same thing in business school, in corporate america, in higher academic circles with just as much jargon, abbreviations, and crap that people parrot back to you. It wasn't much different with acetate overhead slides run off a computer printer or photocopied from books. Whether it's medical school powerpoint, undergrad powerpoint, powerpoint in PdD programs, or at Los Alamos...you will get crap no matter depending on the presenter.

I'm not sure why you're so resistant to the idea that med school might be different to other experiences. Sure, it's analogous in a lot of ways, but I don't see why you insist that you have some idea of what it's like when you haven't started yet.

I think Prowler makes a good point - we probably just remember the poor powerpoints with more bitterness than people in corporate America do (even if the presentations are of similar quality) because we spend so much more time trying to study from these presentations - not just for exams, but trying to really learn the info for Step 1 and rotations.

We're not putting you down - in 7 very short months (and they will fly by, especially if you have exams every week or so), you'll be where some of us are standing. You'll get there, and we know that. You're just not there yet - it's not a big deal.
 
It's all well and good for folks to talk about their reactions (sometimes startlingly emotional) to PowerPoint because those are assumed to be opinions. For my money, the best posts on SDN start with "In my experience...", "For me...", or end with "...but that's me." The problem I see, however, is when people start making empirical claims that aren't backed up:

This is nothing special to medical school. It's prevalent throughout academia...
Why do you say this? Have you personally experienced an MBA, PhD, and MD track, or is it your belief this is the case? If you have experienced them, have you sampled more than one school?

...the medschool experience is a unique pain that one only truly understands once they've experienced it.
Same question.

While it's all nice and good to say that medical school courses are something special, but they aren't. You'll find the same thing in business school, in corporate america, in higher academic circles with just as much jargon, abbreviations, and crap that people parrot back to you. It wasn't much different with acetate overhead slides run off a computer printer or photocopied from books. Whether it's medical school powerpoint, undergrad powerpoint, powerpoint in PdD programs, or at Los Alamos...you will get crap no matter depending on the presenter.
Same question again.

In my opinion, sloppy language may be a surrogate for sloppy thinking. Three different people addressed the same dogma and didn't support it for or against, and in the end the result is that we have to choose to believe one person or the other two with no real objective basis for making the decision. Giving an opinion is no-holds-barred, but when we declare things to be true we should provide an argument AND data to support it. I rarely see this on SDN and I think we could benefit from it.
 
Why do you say this? Have you personally experienced an MBA, PhD, and MD track, or is it your belief this is the case? If you have experienced them, have you sampled more than one school?

Some PhD track, corporate America "track", taken a few medical school "level" classes in undergrad (same powerpoints, same professor, same exams, just given in undergraduate and at a medical school), and been to about 5 colleges/universities over the past 18 years ranging in time before powerpoint existed(the era of chalkboards), the birth of projected PowerPoint(and a few whiteboards) to the current pervasive use of PowerPoint. Basically, I feel I have a broad overview of before powerpoint and the current state of affairs today. My point is that the tools have changed, the crappy instructors haven't.

Like many have said before, medical school isn't hard material. It's just lots of it thrown at you really fast, so you have to absorb it much faster than normal. That's what's special/hard about medical school. The whole "drinking from a fire hose" analogy. I'm sure that all of we 2011'ers will live that experience very soon. :clap:

In some ways, after thinking about it, that PowerPoint may be good for medical education. Much of what I hear MS1 and MS2 are about is memorizing lots of information so that you can do well on the USMLE Step 1. If your professors are just giving you pared down lists of information to memorize in the form of PowerPoints, then that might be a good thing. Maybe not, don't know at this point.
 
What do most lecturers do with Powerpoint?

Simply recite the points that are already displayed on the screen. Because, after all, we can't read.

It's a lazy crutch for lecturers. They may as well not even be there.

It's nice to be able to download the lectures to your computer, but oh my God, Powerpoint lecturers are BORING.
 
When it comes Boards-time get ready to actually learn mechanisms. After each Board exam, go for a walk and let go of your $40,000/year for PowerPoints Education.

You have to be kidding. Or else you're mistakenly calling the NBME shelf exams "board exams."

Either way, this is terrible advice. If you try to "learn" a lot of important stuff (like mechanisms) before Step 1, you'll want to kill yourself. You must learn them as you go along, so that you can review them before Step 1.
 
Top