Reading from slides is the absolute worst way of delivery anywhere, whether it’s a lecture or an internal presentation to your work team, doesn’t matter. The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.
Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. When done properly with a stylus, it’s incrementally better in almost every way than chalk, though a proper lecture hall with multiple blackboards will still hold its own.
I slightly disagree. Specifically, in the case of academic lectures, on:
> The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.
Especially when not taking notes, having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great to allow you to go back to the content of the lecture days or weeks later.
That does not mean that I want a lecturer to just read from the slides. But I want the slides to be more than just a visual aid for the lecture. They need to be reference material as well. This is also generally accepted, and can be considered the reason so many other presentations where this is a bad idea, still have the bad lecture-style slides. Because its what is modeled to people during their education.
Note, for presentations to stakeholders, or presentations of results, or almost any other type of professional presentation. Slides should probably be visual aids only, and not reference material. But lectures are a special case.
> having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great...
This is usually considered a great sin by presentation gurus, even for lectures. For academic material, there would hopefully be a textbook as a reference material.
Although I would prefer the slides having no overlapping words, but doing it this way is very punishing for whoever that skip the class for whatever reason.
Looking at the slides no longer build enough context for you to learn and catchup on what you have missed, so in the end every lecture is unskippable.
Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. When done properly with a stylus, it’s incrementally better in almost every way than chalk, though a proper lecture hall with multiple blackboards will still hold its own.