I recently had the opportunity to do a peer observation of a colleagues online course. It was a good example of a basic online course. The most outstanding feature was professional-grade short video clips created by the professor and other colleagues. The course organization, like calendars and layouts, was very tight. It was clear that much thought and effort went into the development of the course.
Something that bothered me though was the use of PowerPoint slides in this course. (I naturally obsess about all matters related to PowerPoint.) The slide decks were from the textbook publisher, the ones offered as an ancillary resource. They had a nice, professional appearance. The slide formatting was the typical bullet points and occasional images. The content was heavy, giving the presentations a very textbook-like feel.
At first impression, uploading the publisher's prefabricated slide deck seems to be the right thing to do. It's an easy way to build an online course. Students seem to think that slide decks = lectures anyway. Just put the slides online for the students and call it good. The lecture part of the course is done.
Digging deeper though, this basic approach falls far short of best teaching practices. Let's consider the problems.
Using the publisher's slide deck eliminates the professor's unique voice and views. Teaching excellence partly involves communicating passion for the topic to the students. This isn't going to happen with a prepared slide deck. The human element will be lacking. The publisher's slide decks have a cold, mechanical feel. It's a joyless march through key terms.
PowerPoint files provided by the textbook publisher are largely just copied from the textbook. There's really no need to provide an abbreviated version of textbook content in PowerPoint format. It's redundant. It's maybe even harmful to learning if students use the slide decks and skip the textbook readings.
Most PowerPoint files are not meant to be used as a stand-alone resource. It's just an outline with pictures. This is too impoverished to be used for online learning.
We should also question the strategy of replicating lecture methods in an online course. My view of online teaching is that the textbook takes care of the responsibility of delivering basic content knowledge. The faculty role is to take learning to a new level by using creative assignments that, hopefully, lead to some student insights. The textbook handles the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy (memorization, understanding). This frees the faculty member to pursue more interesting high-level cognition.
For these reasons, I think it is best to avoid a simple upload of publisher PowerPoint files to online courses. Ideally, PowerPoint files uploaded to online courses should provide something unique from the educator. Good presentations should have a voice and convey some passion. These online presentations should also have pre-recorded narration or extensive supporting text to give them a stand-alone capability.
Let's drop the common, but dull practice of simply uploading publisher-provided PowerPoint files to online courses. Make your own slide decks that address the concerns describe above or go without. Nobody will miss the absence of a textbook-based slide deck in an online course.