Bret Devereaux

Looking over my student feedback for this last semester, one thing I find a touch odd are student requests for more text-oriented powerpoints (e..g powerpoints 'with notes'). Which I find odd because this is exactly what I was taught *not* to put on a teaching powerpoint.

Do you have "speaking notes" for the spoken portion, or an outline, or is it totally off the cuff? Students may be asking for the "speaking notes". Lectures can be very very good, but "asynchronous communication" is becoming more popular

I have speaking notes, but those aren't produced for a student audience; they're rough bullet points to remind me where I am going and to contain key, hard to remember data, etc. They're also rough-cut and I cannot imagine ever handing them out.

They might work as a mnemonic for someone who did attend your lecture?

So this is something I'm not sure is obvious if you don't teach and publish at the college level. Anything I physically hand to students is going to end up on the internet (much to my irritation). That has some implications.

First, there is the concern that my lectures are, well, my lectures. I wrote them, along with my powerpoints. They are part of the value proposition I bring when I sell myself to potential employers as a teacher. You may readily understand why I don't want them on the internet.

Recordings of lectures have similar issues. But the second issue is that if I am going to hand something out, it must be written entirely differently from something that is just for my own use.