The slide deck is the most misleading document you own
It feels like the authoritative source — it is what the lecturer showed, it covers the syllabus, it is right there in the VLE. But a good deck is deliberately sparse: it exists to be spoken over. The bullet reading "∴ instability" was thirty seconds of derivation. Revising from the deck alone means revising from the compressed artefact and reconstructing the compression from nothing.
This is why students who feel they "know the slides" walk out of exams surprised. They knew the outline. The exam asked about the thing the outline was pointing at.
Slides plus audio is the combination that works
Put the deck and the lecture recording in the same space and the notes Thaxas builds draw on both: the structure from the slides, the substance from what was actually said. A citation can point at slide 14 and at minute 31, because the answer came from the two of them together. That is as close as you get to having been fully present and fully attentive, which nobody is at 9am.
What it does with a deck
- Reads the speaker notes, which most students never open and which often contain the actual explanation.
- Handles PPTX and PDF exports, plus Google Slides exported to either.
- Reads the diagrams rather than skipping them — the figure is frequently the whole point of the slide.
- Keeps slide numbers as citations, so a fact in your notes is traceable to the slide it came from.