Teaching without PowerPoint slides in engineering: A pilot study

Using PowerPoints slides (PPT) to deliver lectures has become the norm and common practice in academia over the last decade. Despite the benefits of PPT in providing smooth presentations and helping to prompt the presenter, the use of slides in engineering teaching has its own drawbacks. By using slides in teaching, the information will be provided in a discontinued and very abstract format. However, as a matter of fact, students mainly depend on lecturing slides in their learning and only use the slides to prepare for their exams. Students rarely read beyond what is given in the slides or refer to the reading list for more in-depth knowledge. This creates a gap in knowledge, affects the overall student experience and, to a certain level, affects graduate employment. In this paper, we review a pilot experiment to test a new teaching theme in engineering with no PPT slides. This was implemented for a Level 4 module, Mechatronics 1, which is a newly developed module in the Mechanical/Marine Engineering programmes at Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK. The outcome of this practice is evaluated with the focus on student views, assessment results, and overall assessment of this style of teaching.