Is PowerPoint killing the art of medical teaching and is the interactive board way forward?

Abstract

In classroom teaching, especially in the medical field, it has made the teaching-learning method very effective. Medical teaching evolves quite rapidly, and the same set of slides becomes outdated very frequently. PowerPoint presentation (PPT) are easily editable and hence save a lot of time while updating. Furthermore, medical teaching (any subject) has a lot of pictures and videos in teaching. These can be quite easily and effectively used in PPT, which is not possible in Chalk and Board. Effective teaching is not only dissipation of information but also about continuity and storytelling. This generally gets affected if someone is over reliant on slides in PPT. In our view, a PPT should have at most 15 – 20 slides for a 1-h lecture. This will allow more time in discussion and less time in slide reads.