Lectures. Huh. What are they good for?

Very few profs lecture in the medieval sense of the word, that is, they don't read and comment on a text. The few courses I took where this old practice was revived were among the best I can remember, especially lectures on Hegel's Logic conducted by J.N. Findley, who sounded rather like a kindly Darth Vadar.

Thing is, when a prof assigns a text, the assumption is that it will be read and, if read, actually understood. That's fairly dubious, even if you don't bring up the further assumption that the prof also read and understood the text. Reading crucial passages closely surely isn't the be-all and end-all of a philosophical education; but I think it is highly edifying to recognize how sloppily most of us read most of the time.

By the way, when people wonder out loud why Heidegger was so influential granted his ghastly prose, they ought to read some of works that transcribe his lecturing style, which was always extremely detailed and often oddly intimate. It really works, and you can get a feeling for his intensity and charisma even at the distance of 70 years. I gather that Wittgenstein's performances were similarly arresting.

I attended all the lectures in a math class I had back in the early '90's as part of an applied geology course at RMIT. I bombed out both years I did of that math class. I aced the geology, chemistry and did fine in the engineering parts of that course, but didn't attend all the lectures. I never finished that degree.

I got a computer science degree from Deakin (off campus) in the late 90's without ever seeing any lecturer, all via mail and the occasional email. Similarly I'm doing fine in a psychology course off campus (3rd year now) and won't have any lectures attended. Now if only I could get a PhD off campus.

Anyway, I'm not sure of the value of lectures. I learn well by reading a book and thinking about it. If I can visualize it someway, often I draw little circles of key ideas joined by lines to other key ideas when studying, I get it.....

I'm currently taking a university pedagogy course, and from this it looks like there is agreement that droning on for 50 minutes is a poor way of imparting knowledge and understanding. One argument is that students learn better if they are more active, so the lecture should be split up with sections where the students get to do something (ask questions, work in small groups etc.).

I don't know how well that works in practice, to find out is one of my jobs for the next couple of weeks.

Bob

I think lectures force you to interact with the material to some extent. The best class I've ever taken consisted of lectures with about 11 students, and incredibly hard homeworks which forced you to use the material. On the other hand, the other handful of top classes I've taken were ones I almost never attended, but also had incredibly hard homeworks along the same lines. I tend to agree that applying the material is what is needed, but lectures are useful for people without a huge amount of self-discipline (myself emphatically included).

My institution has done distance learning for ages, and students can download the lectures from the website complete with an audio recording of the lecture itself. Despite that, the majority of students (at least in the 2nd and 3rd-year courses I've been involved in) still turn up the the lectures. So they obviously think they're getting something out of it.

I wouldn't expect undergrad students in classes larger than about 10 to ask questions, though. Even in labs, they don't.

A definition I picked up somewhere goes like this:

"A lecture is a process for transferring information from the note book of a professor to the note book of a student without having it pass the either person's brain."

All too true, unfortunately! As I see it, the main problem is the same as in most communication failures: the lecturers are not enough in touch with the students' level of understanding and their grasp of the language of the topic at hand. Thus, while what they say might make perfect sense and be an excellent basic-level summary of the topic for those already knowledgeable, it doesn't work at all for those on the outside wanting in.

With large, heterogeneous classes, it isn't easy to understand how to best present something, but if you don't start by some kind of diagnostic to assess your audience (this can be done very infomally, by the way), chances are you will be missing the mark. Obviously, you will also need to check if you're being understood by using open-ended questions along the way.

... or you use the method of one of a lecturer I had in microbiology: when a student didn't understand something and asked a question, the lecturer would repeat the same words but with a louder voice, sometimes almost shouting at the student, as if understanding could be forced into the brain. After a few examples of this, not many questions were being asked...

Lectures are cheap.

One employee, maybe full-time with benefits, more often part-time with no bennies, yammering away in front of 80-100-300 paying customers (sorry, I meant "students") gives a very high profit ratio.

Lectures are cheap.

Distance learning is even cheaper - no costs for office or lecture-hall plant or housekeeping, no computers beyond a server or two. Heck, you don't even have to spring for a coffee maker.

It's all about dollars/euros/pounds/yen.

fusilier
James 2:24

I'd recommend purchasing McKeachie's (2002) book, which has many teaching tips and a chapter concerning lectures.

Highlights of the lecture chapter:

(1) Discussion methods are superior to lectures in student retention of information at the end of course; transferring knowledge to new situations; development of problem solving and thinking; and motivation to learn further.

(2) Enthusiastic lecturing (moving around, making eye contact with students, gesturing) enhances student attention during lectures.

(3) Lecture is very useful for portraying a scholar in action (e.g., teaching problem solving skills) that no other method rely can

(4) A major problem with lectures, is that students will assume a passive, nonthinking, information receiving role. To deal with this, there should be interactive components to the lecture (or at least a mix between discussion and lecture). Among the suggested ways to do this include: use of the clicker (technology that allows students to answer multiple choice questions using a remote control device); one minute paper (get students to write in one minute, what they've learned during lecture--some instructors may request such papers be turned in as a participation aspect of their grade); buzz group method (students broken into smaller groups to discuss particular principles and engage in problem solving); fishbowl method (1/2 class is broken into a discussion group, ther other 1/2 of the class observe).

A rather famous approach (but not usually done at the postsecondary level, and used primarily as a tool for developing better relationships between classes that have a high level of ethnic diversity), is the jigsaw puzzle classroom. Students are given a problem to solve, and each group is assigned a topic that represents an aspect of the problem. Enhanced understanding of the problem occurs when the different groups come together and discuss their findings with the other groups.

Not sure exactly how this info would work in the in the context of online lecturing though. Perhaps check out the book by Jonassen, Peck, and Wilson (1999) for that. However, I personally have adapted a couple of my classes to include both lecture and online instruction. For the online part, after each lecture session, I have students find out more about a term found in their texbook they find interesting, and report back (in an online setting) to other students in the class. That gets them into the habit of not only researching, but discussing it with others; especially as I use a synchronous online [i.e., chatroom] approach. However, an asynchronous message (such as setting up a class website where students can post their work) could be used as well.

Their mark is based on their actual research and how they respond to other student work.

References

Jonassen, D.H., Peck, K.L., & Wilson, B.G. (1999). Learning with technology: A constructivist perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.

Mckeachie, W.J. (2002). Mckeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Having presented 80 jillion lectures, I agree it is a poor format. It is almost universal because it is cheap and works to some extent. There are points of view; one of my colleagues commented that it was a waste of his time for him to lecture to less than 200 students. Our largest lecture hall seated 186.

One thing I tried in the large introductory biology lecture was to seat the students according to their 20-person lab sections. Their lab instructor sat with them. I was hopeing to con them into thinking of the course as a 20 person course which, on occasion, met with other groups. I got enough complaints from the I-must-sit-in-the-front-row people that I dropped the idea.

The real problem with mass education, I think, has to do with temperment. There is an argument that people fit into a fairly small number of temperment types, each of which has a quite different outlook on life. So, at any given time in a large lecture section, only a few(if any) of the students are being effectively taught. Ideally we would evaluate students as individuals and teach them in groups of common temperments. We would teach each group in the way most effective for that group. One can forget about this in an egalitarian society.

I don't teach the book as such. Why pay a high-dollar(+/-) professor to do that? On the other hand, both the student and I have the book, so it is a common tool. The book is useful in that it contains mistakes. Dimetriodon is not a dinosaur, there are too rabbits in South Americia, etc.

I've been involved only a little in distance learning, which was surprisingly successful. But I think personal contact, even across a lecture podium, is a very important part of the educational process. I didn't like writing a letter of reference thusly, "This person was number 27 out of a class of 184. I would not recognize him if I met him in the hall."

@9

Herrmann Brain Dominance Inventory

As a recipient of lectures a long time ago I found them useful.

I got to meet and interact with the other students, it was a small class normally (sometimes we got lumped in with the other engineers in common subjects) so we could get to know the lecturers and discuss the subjects with them and with each other.

I had to get out of bed and attend, very useful for me as I wasn't very good at self motivation then (still not great at it).

So with a small group in a small classroom lectures can work very well. The mass lectures not so good for me.

When I run training courses, I limit the number of attendees to 12 (fewer if I can) as I find it very hard to get a feel for how everyone is doing and I've found, from subsequent audits, there is less retention of the training.

So lectures are good for some people especially in small groups. Others may be able to learn from books, I always found it very useful to discuss what was in the book with others and, of course, a good teacher can make even a seemingly dull topic come alive.

One of the more effective teachers I had would assign readings before each class. At the beginning of the class, he'd ask for questions on the readings. If there were none, he talked about something tangential, but the readings were still on the test. We learned very quickly to ask questions.

First, thanks for calling my little piece to the attention of so many astute readers, and thanks to them for making so many valid points. There is truth in all of them. I will, however, stick to my guns and aver that lectures are a fine way to teach. I agree that they don't surpass other teaching modes, if one judges performance on multiple-choice exams and the likes. Lecturing is an inefficient way of delivering information, and if that is the main purpose of the exercise, they should be scratched in favor of some (even cheaper) form of long distance teaching. I do believe, however, that students benefit from being challenged when the lecturer shares a proper rumination of what is being taught. Not everyone does this, God knows, but a decent lecturer reveals in a lot of personal attitudes, such as how the material relates to the rest of the course/world, how it is perceived by experience, and so on. All good stuff. Call me medieval. Well, I'm in my dotage but I'm not quite that old.

I would add that a major benefit for the students is that it forces a precise timetable on them. Especially in the first year of an undergraduate course this can be very useful to the student as time self-management is a skill that takes at least a year to acquire.

On Monday morning at 09:00 I will be thinking about abstract algebra.
At 10:00 I will be thinking about electrodynamics.
etc.

Setting the pace like this helps.

I often found lectures particularly helpful, and the more difficult the material, the harder I relied on them.

Tutorials were often a waste of time for me. Exams, though I got quite good at them, weren't much use as a learning tool.

Once I learned how to do them well, assignments that allowed a certain degree of open-ended exploration were also extremely valuable.

So for me, lectures and assignments were the big thing.

Nowadays, I mostly read papers to learn new stuff; frankly, I wish they each came with a lecture.