Today I did something humbling. I logged into the Monash Uni
online lecture recording system, and listened to myself giving a lecture. Urgh!
Does my voice really sound like that? Hang on, I think what I just said there was
not entirely accurate. I say “actually” a lot. Wow, Chris, that was a really,
really bad joke. Strangely enough, many of the 200-odd students in the room
laughed.
The undergraduate university lecture has come in for a
hammering in recent times. The momentum is all for ‘active-learning strategies’
- inquiry oriented learning, problem based learning, collaborative learning,
group work, POGIL, IBL - and the list goes on. And I am personally one of the
many who have espoused this, reforming lab programs and reformatting our
classroom activities in first year chemistry. There’s no question in my mind
that learning is enhanced when students not only absorb the answers to
questions, but are pushed to come up with the questions that need to be
answered.
Death By PowerPoint: The didactic lecture (Me talk. You listen.) almost certainly has inherent problems. It’s foundation lies in the
idea that the teacher is a fountain of knowledge, and that by some
as-yet-undefined and mysterious process of brainwave osmosis, that knowledge is
transmitted to students purely by talking at them for 50 minutes, non-stop. And
for the past couple of decades, this has routinely gone hand-in-hand with a
smorgasbord of PowerPoint slides, cluttered with even more information to be
absorbed.
That might sound like an extreme case, but there’s a LOT of
that going on in our lecture theatres. At the same time, there are many lecturers
who are mixing things up: showing short video clips, telling contextual
anecdotes, promoting Q & A, and telling jokes, presumably better than mine.
What future for The Lecture? Burgeoning
enrolments and blossoming cohorts ensure our classrooms are bursting at the
seams, and the business model of universities means this is not going to change
any time soon. Small group tutorials and lab classes, and the beneficial
learning environment they enable, are increasingly being squeezed out by ever tightening
budgets. It seems that lectures are here to stay – how else to deliver content
to our army of young minds?
There are alternatives of course – our content can be
delivered online. Learning management systems (eg. Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) not
only host our materials, they incorporate discussion forums, facilitate quizzes
and host our gradebooks. Multimedia options are playing a greater role, for
example short, online videos have quickly gained popularity in recent years, as
software packages like Camtasia have emerged to make producing such things
incredibly easy.
I have heard many people speculate that within a few years,
lectures will simply disappear. Yet despite all of the new and technology-enabled
methods for delivering learning materials and programs, our own focus groups
and polling in chemistry suggest students still value the lecture. Late
last year ~500 first year chemistry
students were polled to gain their perceived value of face-to-face classes. Not
surprisingly, our small group tutorials are very popular, but what did surprised
us was how popular our lectures are. Students clearly see lectures as playing
an important role in their learning, whether they attend in person, or
watch and listen to a recording elsewhere, at a time of their choosing. In contrast, our more interactive 'workshops' did not rate as highly.
"I found lectures/workshops/tutorials to be an effective way to learn about chemistry."
So if lectures are here to stay … If we are to accept
lectures are valued by students, maybe we don’t need to change anything? Maybe
50 minutes of Me talk. You listen. is enough? Personally, I don’t buy that. The way that the modern
student engages with information is changing, and technology is enabling us to
do some cool things in the classroom (eg. clickers, digital inking, class polling,
snap quizzes). In chemistry, we have been bringing back the ‘lost art’ of demonstrations,
which at some point got phased out to squeeze in that extra couple of
PowerPoint slides! I'm not suggesting we all have to be circus performers, but we should be thinking outside the box, and looking for the best way to engage our students' minds for that 50 minutes.
Perhaps more importantly, a lecturer is a human being. I think
students like the fact that a real person fronts up and shares their
knowledge in a large, group forum. They deliver expert knowledge, share their
research, tell their nerdy jokes and anecdotes, and students identify with that.
And with that I urge my lecturing colleagues to embrace their own style and
approach, whether that is by using carefully crafted PowerPoint slides, by digitally
inking a tablet, or by sporting a bucket of chalk in Theatre S13. Oh, and have fun - it's infectious.
