It's an incredibly efficient way to scale your education system to the masses but it's producing broken people at the end of it who end up believing math is just about following the correct steps, history is about memorizing facts and english is about putting enough words on the page to hit a word count.
Instead, we should be training students to take an outcome focused approach. Define what is the ultimate goal they want to accomplish, establish how to measure their impact towards the goal and suggest previously established strategies that have historically helped but then only evaluate them on whether they successfully achieved their outcome.
Sports is actually a great example of this system working in practice. Your goal is extremely clear, there's clear feedback on your performance and tactics are widely available to learn. Nobody will penalize you in sports if you choose to kick with your left foot when "everyone knows" only right footed kickers succeed in life.
More education should be structured around such a philosophy.
I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about.
Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to like giving out what amount to useless slides most of the time in place of a recording of the presentations.
At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes.
It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
Example: https://git.csx.cam.ac.uk/x/ucs/u/fanf2/talks/2014-03-nws42....
If they miss the talk, send them straight to the more detailed docs, and they can ask questions.
As sibling posts mention, there could've been a need for explicit slides (maybe in lieu of a write-up).
Say you are working with a technical crowd, who may well be taking the presentation back with them for further study. In this case, having some depth in the slides might make a lot of sense, as would adding notes and links to information they will need or want. For that scenario, some careful use of bold, color, size will provide talking points useful for interactive discussion. No need to just read the slide.
(I hate it when people just read the slides)
Other times, it might make sense to have very brief bits of info. Often sales presentations go this route, but technical ones can too. People may take the presentation for reference later, but they came for the dialog and or what you are presenting more than they did attend to get all the info in text form.
IMHO, my experience so far has been to know your audience long before you build anything. It's very helpful to get a review from a peer too. If it's important, it's also worth a half hour to talk through with somebody who can provide some insight.
I've also found there is a very significant difference between selling ideas, things and people, and more detailed education type tasks. It's extremely efficient to pack presentations full of info for classroom settings. Depending on what one is teaching, and if it needs some interactive exercises or not, one document may make optimal sense. The people teaching for a living may well be demonstrating a strong bias here, well intended, that just might not be appropriate in a business setting.