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Comment by Ukv | Hacker News Reader

> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides.

I don't feel like asking for the slides is unreasonable/unimaginable. Probably varies by university and department, but for my degree (pre-COVID) all lecturers made their slides available on a VLE, generally in advance of the lecture.

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It's also much easier to pay attention if you don't have to frantically take notes. To focus on what an equation means, instead of focusing on transcribing it correctly, and then maybe trying to understand it later, if there's any time left, before the lecture moves on.

Of you summarize yourself what the professor said and write it by hand there are more chances you will remember it.

Absolutely true, and writing down 'cheat sheets' of such summaries was one of the most effective ways to learn. But I simply did not have the understanding yet, within 60 seconds of being presented new material, to be able to write a good summary of it. And at the same time also write a non-summary, in the likely case that things would not be clear from the summary alone when reviewing. And do all of this before the lecture moves on to the next thing that needs first understanding, then transcribing, then summarizing.

This is why one attends lectures, reads the book, takes notes for both, and then assembles a summary.

It's called studying.

Yes. And is studying more, or less efficient, when lectures are spent focused on transcription, instead of the material?

In lectures, focus on the material. When working from the book, you have oodles of time to transcribe. Hence, both modes of learning.

For some lectures I follow the course in class. For some other lectures I just read the slides on which the lectures are based and go in depth on my own. Some other friends follow all the lectures. Some others just don't follow that much.

I don't know why you provide a one method that should fit everyone, while everyone has a preferred way of studying that isn't necessarily the best approach for other people

Because the lecturing professor assigned a textbook, making both lectures and the textbook relevant to the course.

Also, it's at least three distinct methods! Read before lectures, read after lectures, read on both sides. Dealer's choice. Neglects recorded lectures and the possibilities they open up.

Talking about people's preferences and studying is funny. Most people prefer not to study. Preferences have little to do with good study habits. The above approaches have worked for hundreds of years just fine.

Well, of course if a textbook is required to be read, you read it period. I was talking about different study methods in the bounds of what is allowed to do

Yeah but depending on the pace of the lecture you might not even get everything down. So it's better to take some notes after class like this

Yea, this one was weird to me. Most of my professors would automatically send out their slides after class. After all you just… showed them to the whole class. What’s the point of keeping them a secret afterwards?

Same. My professors did this because they wanted you to not be spending your time and energy writing notes during class but instead following the lesson and asking questions.

Here in italy, in stem university (especially computer science) being given slides is a given.

Some teachers record their lectures as well, although it's not mandatory. For some subjects I prefer following in the class, and for some others imho having the slides and doing on your own is much better than having to follow lectures. It depends. But at least, you have a choice

Edit now that I think about it, everyone's mileage may vary wildly. I think I haven't been studying by taking notes in a lot of time. I'd rather just read the slides and try to understand the whys and whats behind what was explained. Some colleagues of mine would rather take notes or write a condensed version of the course material to better remember it. I guess ymmv a lot

Yea this was the one part that puzzled me. Why would a professor be protective of their lecture slides? I seem to remember most of my professors being fine with distributing these. Or at least it was never a point of contention.

Typically, the issue is slides allows the speaker to present stuff much faster than a person can realistically write (unlike writing on a board), so you end up with lossy notes. The coping mechanism for students is therefore by writing notes on the slides. Slides also help you preview the lecture, though few people probably actually do this.

My psych professor twenty years ago gave out the slides with strategic blanks in them, that way you didn't have to write the whole thing down, but you did need to listen at least to the point where you could fill in the missing bits.

But why wouldn't you just give them the slides? Isn't it the students problem if there is stuff missing?

It's not me who doesn't give the slides. Some people are just precious about their work. I personally don't think this type of attitude is great for a teaching professional.

> you end up with lossy notes

Notes are definitionally lossy. If they weren't lossy, they'd be a transcript.

The act of compressing a lecture into notes helps students learn. Merely transcribing does not imply understanding.

What I find though when taking notes from a non-academic conference presentation is that I often don’t know what the most salient points or compressed takeaways are in real-time. I don’t end up with a transcript but I do end up with a lot of discard and I’ll take pics of some slides.

Compressing accurately requires understanding what's important.

If you understand it that well already, why are you attending a lecture that covers it?

Truly excellent lecturers can often guide some people to that understanding in a note-friendly amount of time, but oh god, most people are not excellent lecturers. The vast majority that I attended were almost literally just reading from the book in class. Book-structured information isn't at all the same as lecture-structured.

I’m terrible at learning from powerpoints just by watching/listening so I would write down ppt slides word for word in lectures. I absolutely could never keep up with the lecture pace, the instructors would move on to the next slide too quickly. They were usually great lecturers, it’s just inefficient to spend the extremely precious lecture time waiting for students to copy things down.

I did finally settle on a better solution, because my professors all shared the ppt slides at least day-of for every lecture. So I downloaded the ppt onto my tablet and used a stylus to write my notes to each slide. It worked well for me

When I was an undergrad (2008-2012) I don't think I even had any classes that were given as PowerPoint slides. If they had been though, I don't think I would have felt bad asking for them - they definitely could have helped jog my memory! Notes aren't always perfect...

I was in school (2011-2016) and almost all professors had a wiki or moodle where we could find all their slides and documents.

I noticed that the rare few professors who didn't upload their powerpoints, were mostly the ones who would just recite the content of their slides in class (almost) word-for-word.

I don't think I ever took any lecture notes at all in the entirety of my CS education at Carnegie Mellon, long before COVID. Everything the professors taught was in slides that were published online, or in the best cases, full fledged PDF lecture notes that explained everything in detail and were published online.

This makes it significantly easier to pay attention during lectures. Denying your students work that you have already done is ridiculous. Whether or not a student wants your lecture notes is orthogonal to whether they come to lecture.

From my experience, if a lecturer doesn't give slides, there are two possible reasons:

1) They are not theirs and want to avoid being caught; 2) They believe they are the only source of truth and need to show the insects, I mean students, their place.

Saw both of them.

And if there are no lecture notes, I am not going to be more engaged with it. Au contrare, I will be franaticaly copying everything from them to my notebook and not listening to the lecture itself.

Being given slides online and in paper form was a given when I went to university two decades ago, which puts the OP's "kids these days" rant into context[1]. You soon learned which lecturers added value with insights or exposition that went beyond the bullet points...

[1]with one exception, who used an overhead projector, except for the time it failed when she cancelled the lecture because she refused to use the blackboard on the grounds of aversion to chalk dust. A good lecturer tbf, and I think even she supplied us with blank subtitled lecture notes to copy her graphs onto

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