This site already has a critical problem when it comes to RTFA. Sure, paywalls aren't bad in and of themselves but to direct a site like this to a paywalled article is a particulalry shady form of advertising IMO.
> "door slams asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before viewing a site."
Interesting position for a site that paywalls the article.
This varies a good deal from institution to institution. I've gone from places where you were expected (read, bullied) into achieving a certain pass rate (of aroud 90%, regardless of how much work the students were willing to put into the course), where the pass-rate is used only as a possible warning sign of operational difficulties. By far, the institution that I am currently in (which has the latter approach) has the best national reputation for teaching of all the places I have worked. If your course has a low pass rate, you'll be expected to identify it, justify it, identify issues that may have caused it, and provide a *reasonable* plan of action for improvement[1]. It works well.
Student attainment levels are a ridiculous metric, because they are so easily gamed. I plan the course, I deliver the course, I set the assessment, I write the exams, I mark the exams. If I want a pass rate of 94.34% on the nose, I can be damn sure to get it, no matter what level of oversight (short of the Orwellian) there is. Attach consequences to low student attainment, then you will force people to game the system. That's the way we are built as people.
But, it's a cheap, easy, and to those who no longer remember how teaching really works, convincing way to rate teacher ability. It's not really a big surprise that the worst teachers in many institutions (those who don't have the benefit of a high-repute research output to insulate them) often have the most consistently impressive pass rates. You raise a good point, but I think the problem exists primarily in those instutitions that don't really have the confidence to say 'This metric makes no sense'.
[1] A reasonable plan is not 'make the material easier', FWIW.
I don't have any quarrel with what the article says, for the most part. However, it falls into the same trap so many of these things do as equating bad teaching with a bad tool. It's one of my pet hates to see people dismiss Java/C++/C#/Whatever as a 'bad teaching language because ' when every one of those reasons is that it's a tool being used by a bad teacher. As someone who has been teaching programming for coming up to a decade, I find it more than a little frustrating. 'Java is a bad teaching language because it has all the standard data structures built into the library' is one such example. Sure, that's true, but there's nothing stopping you from making people roll their own. I just wish people would stop claimi
Powerpoint is not inherently bad. In fact, for what I use it for, it's an absolutely fantastic package - it is really my cue cards writ large. I don't use animations, sounds, videos (unless appropriate), diagrams, or even coloured backgrounds. It's literally just something I use for cueing my lecture. It contains perhaps 20 minutes of the 60 minutes in a regular lecture, the rest being provided by me and done via whiteboard/blackboard descriptions, contextualising, diagramming and (when I'm lucky) direct dialog with students.
Really the article is - it's bad to deliver the material of other people (I agree, but probably for different reasons). It's bad to deliver material too fast for the class (Well, yeah). It's bad to skip the important contextualising and diagramming in a lecture (sure). None of those things are flaws in powerpoint though. A bad teacher will be a bad teacher regardless. The same thing was very evident when professors taught from the same overhead slides for years. They're not going to get any better if you remove powerpoint from the equation.
Man must shape his tools lest they shape him. -- Arthur R. Miller
