PowerPoint or Prezi: is it time to change our teaching medium?

Prezi is a presentation collaboration founded in April 5, 2009. Like modern touchscreens or Google Maps, Prezi is an example of what scholars of computer-human interaction label a zoomable user interface (ZUI). It is believed that by encouraging users to watch and process information spatially, ZUIs such as Prezi may superior to traditional tools such as PowerPoint that do not encourage such visuospatial integration. In 2017, researchers from Harvard medical school found that Prezi could be preferred over other presentation methods such as PowerPoint or oral presentations. In this study, the audience rated Prezi as more effective, engaging, organized, and persuasive than PowerPoint and oral presentations. In judging the visual components of the PowerPoint and Prezi presentations, participants rated Prezi presentations as more distinctive, visually compelling, and dynamic than PowerPoint slides. With regards of above-mentioned, presentation’s medium can affect quality of education and Prezi may hold the key for improving the quality of educational materials and learning process. A couple of faculty members at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences have started to substitute Prezi for PowerPoint and several contents have been created. However, preliminary feedbacks is considerable, but high quality researches is necessary to evaluate different aspects of this type of teaching medium.