'The Traditional Lecture Is Dead' (wired.com) 233
Rhett Allain, an Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, writing for Wired: What is the traditional lecture? It is a model of learning in which a teacher possesses the knowledge on a given topic and disseminates it to students. This model dates to the beginning of education, when it was the only way of sharing information. In fact, you occasionally still see the person presenting the lecture called a reader, because way back before the internet and even the printing press, a teacher would literally read from a book so students could copy it all down. Now, don't get me wrong. The traditional lecture model worked wonderfully for eons. But it is an outdated idea (free pass for adblockers). Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a college physics course with a professor giving a traditional lecture. Now open your eyes. Did you envision The Best Physics Lecture EVAR? I doubt it. You probably pictured someone droning on and on in front of a chalkboard or PowerPoint presentation. No way that is more engaging or interesting than an episode of The Mechanical Universe , and if you're a teacher who uses traditional lectures, just stop and play the show instead. Everyone will be better off. You may think by now that I think most physics professors are dolts. I promise that's not the case. But traditional lectures simply aren't effective. Research shows students don't learn by hearing or seeing, they learn by doing, a model often called active learning. Physics faculty should start thinking about how they can go beyond just a traditional lecture. There are some easy things they can do (or students can ask them to do) to make learning more engaging. First, make students read the book outside of class, rather than in class. If your lecture merely covers the material in the textbook, why make students buy the textbook? Now, you may put a different spin on the material, but still. You're merely repeating what students can read on their own. Let them do that on their own time, and use the classroom for experiments and demonstrations and so forth.
Oh... no... yet another article on the same... (Score:3, Insightful)
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it has survived numerous challenges. Maybe it is as good as it gets
It is likely as good as it gets for the schools. The traditional lecture to a small class maximizes profit. They see any technological change or improvement in efficiency as a threat. The schools are not going to improve things from within. Change will be forced on them from the outside.
Re: Oh... no... yet another article on the same... (Score:5, Informative)
You need the lectures, the tutorials, the 1 on 1 time and a varied approch. All of these things happen now at the university where I work. There are all kinds of learning and activities put together in the LMS, online. The lecturer is still required and the subject mater expert and the lecture is part of effective modern learning. One thing though is to limit the length of the lecture and keep in mind that its not the whole story. However its far from dead - thats just click bait headlines.
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My class size was 300-500 students.
That was before they quadrupled tuition.
Re: Oh... no... yet another article on the same... (Score:3)
Re:Oh... no... yet another article on the same... (Score:4, Funny)
"A lecture is a method of transferring words from the professor's page to the student's without passing through the brain of either." -- One of my University professors.
He used the lecture time for Q&A or group discussions.
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wrong.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Speak for yourself, a good lecture reduces the time to learn for many. For me, I figure at least 2x. The interactions rapidly clarify areas of confusion.
A great lecture inspires.
Re:wrong.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much this. A good lecture isn't about taking notes down by dictation, or by copying them verbatim from a blackboard.
The notion that if its in the books we can just read it on our own is idiotic... the minute we have a question we have to stop... continuing further just leaves us confused. Reading the book as prep for the lecture is good. Reading the book afterward as review, and for study and reference is great. But if you think a lecture is just the professor reading the book, then you've missed the point of lectures completely.
Re:wrong.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, a lecture is a means of enforcing some students to sit down and at least face the material, rather than staying in the dorm or watching TV and just not getting around to read the books.
(Of course this doesn't benefit the motivated learners who read the books even without a lecture, or make "study dates" with friends. And it doesn't benefit the people who distract themselves during the lecture. And you might argue that it's not the job of a college to improve a student's attention to the material. But nevertheless, the lecture does help at least some people.)
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I'm assuming that "lecture" implies it's at a university? They take the register?
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I'm assuming that "lecture" implies it's at a university? They take the register?
In my university days, if I was assigned reading material, 50% of the time I didn't read it at all or didn't read it very carefully. But when I had a timetabled lecture to attend, 100% of the time I attended it. It didn't physically enforce my attendance (and indeed a register wouldn't do that either). It just helped give an extra nudge.
Of my fellow students, they were all pretty much like me -- we saw each other in the lecture theater so I know they attended, we sometimes walked together to the lecture, an
Re:wrong.... (Score:5, Interesting)
He seems to be talking about "Into to" courses, where maybe he's right, but fancy demos aren't so useful for advanced topics.
I find the best sort of lecture is a recording of the best prof I can find talking to an audience of students who ask a lot of questions. Sure, I may occasionally have some question that wasn't asked in the recording, but as long as the course also has a way to ask that question, it's ideal.
Recorded lectures are great because there's just no tension between making notes and paying attention. I can rewind as much as I need to. I spent a lot of time recently watching lectures on quantum mechanics from Stanford's YouTube channel. Remarkably accessible. The ability to stop the lecture and work the math until I get it changes everything (math is the only useful language for understanding QM, but with dense notation it's very easy to get left behind).
Re:wrong.... (Score:4, Informative)
I am still a huge fan of Socratic learning, but it really doesn't seem to work for a typical audience.
A Few Dimensions (Score:5, Insightful)
A good lecture isn't about taking notes down by dictation, or by copying them verbatim from a blackboard.
The notion that if its in the books we can just read it on our own is idiotic... the minute we have a question we have to stop... continuing further just leaves us confused. Reading the book as prep for the lecture is good. Reading the book afterward as review, and for study and reference is great. But if you think a lecture is just the professor reading the book, then you've missed the point of lectures completely.
There's a few dimensions to this that are important.
First, not everyone is a verbal learner. Some pick up concepts much easier from reading than listening. Sometimes a book diagram can enlighten much better than any hand-drawn diagram on a chalkboard; of course, the professor has the upside of of being able to adapt the drawing based on questions. So really, the two go hand-in-hand. I've actually always felt the opposite of you: the lecture gets me excited about things I should pay attention to, but I don't really understand it until I read the book and do some problems. Your line about getting confused is exactly me in lecture; if I have a question about the lecture but the professor moves on (which often the professor has thought he answered my question, and maybe even I did too), then the rest of the lecture can leave me a bit confused until I read the book later. It's a style difference I think, not making judgments because I don't think either way is "better".
Second, I suspect it depends a bit on the topic. It's difficult to understand a mathematical proof in a textbook for the first time simply by reading (often you need an expert to walk you through it), but there are other subjects that are well-suited to simply reading.
Third, we must separate the ideal from reality. A good lecture will inspire and be very dynamic based on questions and feedback from the students. However, I had several professors at my alma mater Big State University that would walk into class and flat out tell the students "I didn't want to teach this class, I'd rather being doing research, but the chair said I had to". As you can imagine, some professors look at lecture as something you just get through... and yes, they tend to regurgitate textbooks. Even when the professors care, if they wrote the textbook, they're a little partial to that style of presentation obviously and so will mirror much of the material in the book.
So much information is online now (or in books) that it does seem easiest to read books or watch videos outside of class, then use your class time with the expert in the field (the professor) to clarify questions. It's good to have someone walk you through the problems until you get it. Lectures - in video or book format - don't usually do that, instead leaving examples to the reader, which is what really misses the point.
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The notion that if its in the books we can just read it on our own is idiotic... the minute we have a question we have to stop
...and google
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Pretty much this. A good lecture isn't about taking notes down by dictation, or by copying them verbatim from a blackboard.
This so much. Now I know everyone has a different learning style and anecdote is not the singular of data, but in my collegiate experience I was usually the star pupil in every class, and also one of the few students actively engaging with the professor. I also pretty much never took notes, unless something of interest was said that sparked a tangent thought in my mind that I wanted to jot down for my own reference later; I wasn't copying down the words he said or wrote on the board for later reference, I w
Re:wrong.... (Score:5, Interesting)
a good lecture reduces the time to learn for many. For me, I figure at least 2x. The interactions rapidly clarify areas of confusion.
A great lecture inspires.
If you look at the actual recommendations in even the summary, it doesn't suggest no lecturing at all. The best teacher I had did exactly what they suggest; he had us read the chapter and do homework for the chapter before the lecture. Then students would be picked at random to put the answers on the board and we would in turn explain our approach. He would correct us if necessary and field questions from the class. He would then tailor his lecture to the parts students struggled with. I never learned any subject matter more thoroughly than during those three semesters of Engineering Physics.
Re:wrong.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. This is another in a long series of articles that describe the absolute worst possible example of a lecture, declare "lectures" awful and/or dead, and make some exhortation about learning styles (which have zero scientific basis, except for passive/active).
Summary: awful lectures are awful. Good lectures are good. Lectures not dead.
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Yes. This is another in a long series of articles that describe the absolute worst possible example of a lecture, declare "lectures" awful and/or dead, and make some exhortation about learning styles (which have zero scientific basis, except for passive/active).
Learning style is just the converse of teaching style: the teaching style that works best for you. There's lots of scientific work in this area, and whole journals devoted to it, within the field of communication studies (now largely focused on distance learning).
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There's certainly plenty of work to show that different teaching styles or more or less effective for specific students. The entire field of communication studies is about measuring shit like that (psychology not so much). There are multiple journals devoted just to the study of communication within education.
I agree that "learning style" is a marketing buzzword, sure, but there are different communication styles in an educational context, different teachers are going to be better at some than others, and
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Yes. This is another in a long series of articles that describe the absolute worst possible example of a lecture, declare "lectures" awful and/or dead, and make some exhortation about learning styles (which have zero scientific basis, except for passive/active).
Summary: awful lectures are awful. Good lectures are good. Lectures not dead.
It's a Wired article, for goodness sake. How could it be very relevant or informative.
Wired isn't even a very good Mondo 2000 clone.
Re:wrong.... (Score:4, Informative)
Problem is, there are lots of idiots who have actual pull in education who think that video lectures and flipped classrooms and such are amazing ideas that nobody has ever thought of and are sure to revolutionize education.
One of the insidious things about the recent online learning craze is that people actually like watching the educational videos. People like them, and report that they're learning a lot, so they do very well on the self-assessments. But in objective measurements they're terrible.
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If I'm supposed to work through the problems before the lecture, then why would I even be in class?
Because chances are you struggled with at least some of the problems, or perhaps did some wrong without even knowing. If you really were capable of learning everything you need to know without the instructor, you probably should have tried to exempt yourself from the class in the first place. I have found that even in my best subjects there was also something to learn from someone with more experience.
The primary reason I enjoyed this method of teaching is it does a much better job of preparing students for
Re:wrong.... (Score:5, Insightful)
But traditional lectures simply aren't effective. Research shows students don't learn by hearing or seeing,
Let's see this alleged "research." I call bullshit.
Fact: some students learn best by doing. I'm one of them.
Corollary: not all students learn best by doing. My wife is in this category.
Would it be nice to have various styles of teaching so that various styles of students get the most out of it? Sure. But one size fits all solutions are still bullshit. They may fit many, or even most, but never all. Is this method better than what we have today? Maybe for many. But never for all. So stop with the hyperbole. Whereas I might have been interested in your product if you had stuck with objective facts, once you start down the road of hyperbolic bullshit, I'm no longer interested except to bitch about it.
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>> Research shows students don't learn by hearing or seeing,
> Speak for yourself, a good lecture reduces the time to learn for many.
Agreed. This isn't entirely correct -- it depends on WHO and WHAT is being taught. If you are deaf or blind chances are you won't be learning by hearing or seeing respectively.
This claim that "students don't learn by hearing or seeing" is complete bullshit.
Martial Teachers first demonstrate a move or counter-move ...
>> they learn by doing, a model often called
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That should read:
Martial-Art teachers first demonstrate a move or counter-move ... and then get the students to replicate it.
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If you took a lecture on how to mark quotes it was an utter waste of time.
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...as was any lecture you took on the use of commas.
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[citation needed]
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"Im a teacher and students don't listen to me" = tldr
people who dont learn wont learn.
people who arent good at teaching increase the odds that ppl wont learn
The trouble is class size (Score:2)
Re:Speed is important (Score:4, Insightful)
I've dumped network news for Internet news simply because I can get my news five-ten times faster. Likewise, all those science shows on television are unwatchable because of all the filler material. The medium that gives the most information in the least time should always be the winner, but that might depend on the student.
If the lecturers you've experienced are like watching TV of ANY kind, then they were doing it wrong. Proper lecturing is an interactive experience, wherein not only do the students ask the lecturer questions, the lecturer also asks the students questions, promotes discussions, and encourages paths of thought and ideas not covered in the lecturer's notes, nor in the textbook. A good lecturer also paraphrases the book, draws analogies, and in general provides as many ways as possible for students to have access to the course material in a way that they will 'get' and understand.
Concluding that lectures as a whole are ineffective or outdated, without taking into account the quality of the presenter, is kind of like concluding that movies aren't worth watching when all you've seen are Golden Turkey award winners.
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>The medium that gives you the most information in the least time should always be the winner, but that might depend on the student.
FTFY
A three-second radio blast to the skull, modulated to contain the entirety of the German syntax and vocabulary and would be among the faster ways to give that information - but it would be utterly useless, because you can't *receive* it that way.
The goal is not to give information, but to transfer knowledge. And that's a far more subtle and individually variable task.
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I suspect that he's referring to the fact that you actually move things across an equals sign in algebra - there's no mathematical basis for doing so. It's just often written that way as shorthand for skipping the tedious intermediate steps.
Instead, what you actually do is perform the exact same operation to both sides of the equals sign - both sides start out equal, so they will remain equal when doing the same thing to both:
2x + 3 = 7
subtract 3 from each side:
2
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Obviously,I hope, that first line should be:
I suspect that he's referring to the fact that you don't actually move things across an equals sign in algebra
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>Understanding is something that always follows...
Sure. But understanding your tools is something that always precedes mastering their use. And algebra is a tool. If you don't understand the fundamental rules of it, you'll never truly master it. You'll inevitably get tripped up in the corner cases.
>Secondly...
Let me reiterate: I have NO problem whatsoever with saying you're "moving something to the other side of the equation", so long as you you don't believe that's what you're doing. The first is
Wrong you pseudo-intellectual Hipsters (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong.
Beyond Wrong.
"The Mechanical Universe", what the fuck I don't even.
Fuck off with your hipster pseudo-intellectualism. Here is a lecture on hydrostatic pressure by Walter Lewin [youtube.com]. It is more interesting, more entertaining, and more educational than ANY of your pop-science crap. I don't care what privatised iCloud lecture service you are trying to hock, or your bullshit smear stories against Lewin either. The traditional lecture format is better than anything you can come up with with your cheap credit funding and fly by night websites and social media scam promotions.
Get the fuck out of of my fields. Get the fuck out of my hobbies. Get the fuck off the internet you anti-intellectual Hipster frauds!
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Re:Wrong you pseudo-intellectual Hipsters (Score:5, Funny)
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...text, which I heard in a TED talk is totally over as a communication medium. It's all waggling our butts now, like bees.
The other name for that is 'dancing'. As a white male, I am incapable of communicating in that medium.
Re:Wrong you pseudo-intellectual Hipsters (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think you understand hipsters. A true hipster would like lectures precisely because they are old fashioned (vintage) but only in a pseudo ironic way.
"why make students buy the textbook"? (Score:3)
Because the textbook is supposed to have much more detail than what the teacher can provide.
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That's why you have both the lecturer and the textbook.
Flip Lessons (Score:2)
Most teachers are best at interactive teaching rather than lecturing. A lecture requires careful preparation, clarity, good graphics, and careful pronunciation. There is no reason that a very good lecturer can't be recorded and played by the student, allowing them to replay parts that they didn't understand. That frees up the student's and teacher's time to work on exercises together, let's the student explain where they are stuck, and the teacher can help where needed.
None of this is earth shattering,
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That's why universities all use the lecture/seminar/lab triad. Lecturer to teach you (and yes, it's important to have a live lecturer... videos are a very poor teaching method, often worse than nothing), seminar with a TA where you can engage in a smaller group, and lab for hands on.
It's like people figured out this stuff hundreds of years ago.
A good lecture is not repetitive (Score:5, Insightful)
The article (almost in full in the summary above) is making the argument against lectures that a lecture would just be repeating what the student has read on his own in the textbook.
Well, repetition is not necessarily bad. Facts stick if we can apply them, if we can associate them in new ways. A good lecturer does not simply repeat exactly what you read. If you are a good lecturer then you emphasize those things in the subject matter that are the most important and you do that from a slightly different angle than in the textbook. And you do use pictures, drawings, animations or other appropriate media that are not in the textbook - just as you would when making an educational video.
And if you hold a lecture then you should always devote a few minutes to questions. Getting a question cleared up can be all the difference for someone.
If you think lecturing is droning on then you are just a lazy professor.
Learning should be fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Research shows students don't learn by hearing or seeing, they learn by doing, a model often called active learning.
We called it homework.
If your lecture merely covers the material in the textbook, why make students buy the textbook?
That's why I never did.
You're merely repeating what students can read on their own. Let them do that on their own time, and use the classroom for experiments and demonstrations and so forth.
They're called "labs". Learning from reading a textbook alone is hard. It requires discipline, focus, and hard work. If it were easy, we'd have no need for University courses. That's why we have professors who go over it in class, so you can ask questions and have the obscure parts explained to you, and the students who lack the drive to study the book on their own time (most of them) can still learn the material.
In my experience, students mostly prefer the reverse: learn the material in class, apply the material in homework after class.
Learning a new subject is hard work. Classes are there to make the work less hard. Seeing movies and experiments isn't making it less hard, it's just entertainment.
They don't learn with homework either (Score:2)
And for those who are going to start spouting figures about how much we "waste" on education every year a) Learn what inflation is and b) realize that 100 years ago we abandoned most of our population to a l
Personal Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular one of the things I have noticed with many of these new techniques is that they communicate far less information and those using them often have to take material out of a syllabus. They then compare this to the original lecture and it is no surprise that they find that students learn the material better. However if the original lecture format was repeated with the same reduced syllabus and far more time on each topic I expect that this too would get better results if for no other reason than students have less to revise for the exam.
So please let's not start the irresponsible hype that old lectures are dead just because we have an arsenal of new techniques. Some of these techniques may have disadvantages over the "old" lecture style particularly when it comes to the amount of material covered which, for a subject like physics, is extremely important because it has a more linear nature until you get to the final undergrad year. Plus some of the new techniques are grossly unfair since they award marks for a group and not individuals which means it can be heavily influenced by how lucky you are with your group members.
Re:Personal Experience (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you! I'm a fast reader and all of the new video based learning drives me up the wall. I can read at least an order of magnitude faster than someone can talk. If written material were provided in addition to the video that would be great, but people don't generally do that since it's "extra" work.
As for group work, I'm really thankful I didn't have to do more than maybe one or two group projects. I'm a pretty extreme introvert and prefer working alone.
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If written material were provided in addition to the video that would be great
I always do that simply because it is not possible to communicate all the material in a video without making it so long that nobody would ever watch it! The other advantage of this is that after improving the written material a few times it got to the point where I no longer suggest a textbook which saves the students ~$200 each and is vastly more convenient for them since I make it available as an unencumbered PDF...which also had the added benefit that more of them read it so it was win-win-win!
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I teach Computer Science and I have the same experience you have.
Yes reading the textbook is dead but it always was a dumb way of lecturing.
If lecturing consists in speaking for 3 hours with no interactions with the room, then yes it is not effective. But does anyone actually lecture like this? This is not a problem with lecturing, it is a problem with the lecturer.
Reading the textbook is something the students do not do in practice. They barely even read the assignments before they do them.
The problem is t
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The problem is that students do not do homework anymore and almost never on time.
To get around that I use the Moodle online quiz system. It has a merciless timer and I make no exceptions to the deadline although I do drop the lowest mark for illnesses etc. as well as provide two "mock exam" assignments which act as practice for the midterm and final. The questions I wrote usually use randomized numbers so while they can copy the method from a friend they at least have to do the calculation themselves. I also give the assignments very little weight - I actually tried zero (which how it
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Former UK lecturer here.
The labs aren't generally now zero weight (or when I was an undergrad), but standard credit. In other words if you turn up and submit a reasonable write up (as in not obviously massively deficient), you get full marks. There are variations where they are graded, but basically there's a huge jump from fail to third, then everything up from that gets incrementally better marks.
That strongly encourages the students to attend because not attending hammers your marks, but there's very lit
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Indeed. But, you miss the really important stakeholder here. Pearson, Wiley, Cengage, etc.
A lecture is created and delivered by the professor. Thus, it can be used in any way they see fit (modulo blanking any copyrighted material in the slides they project and whatnot.)
But, a slick commercial video. Now that can be copyrighted by Pearson or whichever publishing giant. They can charge for it repeatedly, have it play only on a locked down DRM filled player and revoke the student's access at the end of the sem
get rid of tenure (Score:2, Insightful)
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Pretty hard to get many professors to change their ways otherwise.
That's cute. You think tenured professors do most of the teaching.
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The whole point of getting tenure is so that you can avoid teaching.
Bloody students. Education - at all levels - would run much more smoothly without them.
Only in some cases (Score:2)
1) The topic is something that is learning an algorithm (solving for x^2 = 9), or memorizing important facts ("how many votes does it take for a presidential veto to be overridden?").
Or... 2) The students aren't mature enough to interact with the presenter as an interested or thoughtful peer on a topic. Children learn discipline from listening to and studying information given by authority figures. Adults, however, can read stuff on their own and then interact with th
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What a load of bollocks. I loved it when my students have me shit in my lecture. It meant I'd fouled up and not explained properly and also explored things in more depth. The sharp ones were frankly a pleasure to teach.
That's the advantage of a lecture, you can get real-time feedback.
My students, or at least some of them were more than mature and thoughtful enough to interact with me properly during the lecture, asking questions and not accepting poor answers.
Thirty years ago they had already done this? (Score:4, Insightful)
> use the classroom for experiments and demonstrations and so forth
When I was in school, no teacher or professor merely read from the book. The syllabus would contain what was going to be gone over in class, you were expected to read it before you showed up. Of course, not everyone did that, but the instructor would at least try by telling you and having it written down, as well as posting what problem sets were due and so on.
The lecture period would cover the high points of the text, but it was interactive in that the students could ask for clarification and have the professor work though things on the board. In certain classes there would be a demonstration of principles (if they applied), but not every class had the opportunity for this, such as writing classes. We also had lab sections when applicable for chemistry, physics, biology and so on, where we would learn by doing. I guess the lecture period was for reinforcement of the textbook plus an open forum for asking clarifying questions. Of course, if you were really still in the dark you could always go to office hours.
This was 30ish years ago ... so by the definition of this article I didn't see a "traditional lecture" in the entire time I was being educated. My kids are still in grade school, but they have a very different school day than I ever did, and very much removed from what this guy is railing against.
Given the example of The Mechanical Universe, having a professor show up and play a video every week would make me angry. Why shell out thousands of dollars to have some PhD hit play on a video? Why not engage them at a human level that's been going on since the Greeks were having dialogs ages ago?
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My experience in the mid-90's was pretty similar to yours.
I did have the misfortune of taking maybe two classes where the professor just read out of the book. That made me mad since I always read the material before class. In some cases I had finished the textbook before the first exam. Classes always moved slowly at the beginning of the semester and I took advantage of that to get ahead.
I still needed to attend class to hear any announcements; some professors would claim to have a class website, but t
Probably applies universally (Score:2)
"He's dead, Jim." (Score:4, Insightful)
And of course we all know that means he isn't dead at all.
I have to roll my eyes at this sort of nonsense. The traditional lecture will never go away, although one might hope that lecturers who are crap at it will be more motivated to find alternatives, leaving the good ones to do their thing. [just] "putting a different spin" on the material is often *exactly* what a student needs. I vividly recall an interaction I had with a bunch of extremely intelligent Chinese profs, and I mention the nationality only because the language barrier was relevant. I was trying to explain a certain process, and it took me over a day, drawing and re-drawing and re-wording and re-re-wording until I finally hit on the "spin" that made the connection with one guy, and he explained it to the rest (in Chinese) and we were able to move in. Much the same sort of thing often happens in a lecture setting.
"Traditional" boring droning lectures which re-read the book or the powerpoint slides may be dead, but then they were never alive.
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"Traditional" boring droning lectures which re-read the book or the powerpoint slides may be dead, but then they were never alive.
+25 insightful
Thread over.
Just a "reader"? (Score:3)
>"...a teacher would literally read from a book so students could copy it all down...You probably pictured someone droning on and on in front of a chalkboard or PowerPoint presentation. No way that is more engaging or interesting than..."
When I taught college classes (part-time) I certainly didn't stand there and drone on for students to copy down notes. Neither did many of MY teachers. That is why they have textbooks and handouts. I was there to INTERACT with the students. I asked and answered questions, made them think, created teams for focused discussion or debate, played "what if" games, had people come up and offer ideas. THAT should be the modern teaching method- interaction. So you certainly should lump all "modern teaching" with standing at a board and droning on and on.
Now I will say one reason I stopped teaching was when the dean gave me a set of pre-made handouts and tests and told me they wanted everyone to teach by using/reading slideshows. I promptly told him "You don't need an instructor experienced in the subject matter/field to teach that way- most students won't learn and I am not needed" and they pushed the issue and I resigned at the end of the semester.
Blipvert at 11 (Score:2)
Summary of Summary: Students now assumed to have attention spans and concentration skills of goldfish.
More importantly ... (hey, where'd everyone go?)
This is unmitigated nonsense (Score:2)
Students learn not a lot in lectures, that is not the intention of a lecture. Most learning is something the student has to do on his/her own time. Lectures serve to give a starting approach and, far more important, an appreciation what is more important and what is less so. They also serve as an opportunity to ask questions and to meet people studying the same subject. Sure, self-reliant learning weeds those out that cannot do it, but those people have no business getting an university degree anyways. We a
Same Stuff Different Day (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop deluding yourself. Monkeys are smarter than us. We are social learners who learn by: reading, hearing and doing. Different people do it differently but we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
It is STUPID to state everyone learns physics by doing. Having actually TAUGHT physics, I can tell you have had to demonstrate for some, explain for others and write on the board for yet others.
Everyone's mode of learning is equally valid. And for some, the traditional lecture is just fine.
Best Physics Lecture (Score:2)
Yes, I went to Caltech.
Yes, I was taught physics by David Goodstein.
That is what going to the one of the finest universities in the country gets you.
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The best physics lectures I've seen are some by Richard Feynman that I downloaded from somewhere. Yes a professor in front of a chalkboard. But a professor that was enthralled with his subject and wanted to spread that enthusiasm with the audience. And he knew how to speak in public.
The problem with the university system (at least the one in Canada that I went to) was that the professors were hired based on the research that they had performed and for the research that they could do. Teaching was something
I have done this, but it's not for everyone (Score:5, Interesting)
I have spent the last couple of years building flipped curricula for undergraduate chemistry courses. It's had positive results, and I plan to keep developing it, but there are a lot of caveats.
No, you can not just tell your students to read the textbook outside of class, only about 10% of them will actually do it and you will spend your in-class time recapitulating the all concepts to them anyway.
True, you might have more success with upper levels or with something like a literature course. And you can get better results if you quiz them at the start of class, but that's a bit backwards, given your assumption was they would not understand the material until working problems with you, and takes up valuable class time. Requiring them to outline the chapters is a decent strategy except that it's hard to grade, is a lot of work for the students, and still leaves behind those who have the most trouble grasping overall concepts.
The difficulty with teaching inexperienced students is that they don't have any idea what the essential concepts are or why they are important. Textbooks are excellent references, but if they're heavy enough that you can use them as a weapon, then they contain far too much information for your average student to be able to recognize the salient points and how they fit together, at least until they've already been through the course. That is the purpose of lecture, which is basically rounding up all your students by the campfire and telling them a story that they will understand and remember so that they have a way to interpret all the detail in the textbook. For most of our history spoken story is how humans have learned and things like gesticulation and inflection are surprisingly important in creating a sensible emphasis.
In my courses I have ultimately chosen to produce online lectures delivered via a Moodle [moodle.org] setup loaded with H5P [h5p.org]. I am able to require my students to watch the lectures before class (for a grade) as well as embed interactive questions. Besides keeping my students from nodding off while watching, the questions force them to immediately interpret what they've seen and review the video if they have not understood important aspects. I include worked solutions so that they can do self-assessment on if they have made any errors. When they come to class they work much more complex problems which tie the concepts together. (Anecdotally, I can say this has been fairly effective in that my students seem to require much less "babying" than they used to and usually have more substantial questions to ask during the groupwork).
But it's taken a tremendous amount of time to put together -- I estimate about 5 hours to produce every 15 minutes of video. I am fortunate to be a fulltime lecturer; I don't see how I could have done it with research alongside. Nor could I have done it in my first years of teaching without having first accumulated some traditional teaching experience.
There is also the downside that offering this much help in solving problems can in some ways limit student's ability to develop independent skills. I could assign homework as well, but in this setup they are already assigned to watch videos and at some point you start being abusive of their time. The honest truth is no teaching method exists which can let every student fully retain the contains of a 15 hour course schedule and still live normal happy lives.
But, as helpful as I think guided learning can be, in my opinion part of our goal in college is to teach students to be capable of independent learning. My favorite courses that I have taken myself were not flipped -- they were skilled lecturers who assigned demanding homework problems (probably too long to be done in class anyway). If I needed help I could ask the professors questions during their office hours. This seemed to work well for my peers as well. But we were juniors and seniors at that point knew the ropes, had developed our o
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But it's taken a tremendous amount of time to put together -- I estimate about 5 hours to produce every 15 minutes of video. I am fortunate to be a fulltime lecturer; I don't see how I could have done it with research alongside.
Oh oh please sir me me I know the answer!
1. Go home after it's light, far more often than is healthy
2. Quit the career when you realize it's more, much more than you're prepared to give
3. Take two and a half years to recover from the burn out
4. (Optional) figure out how to have a f
There Are Tools (Score:2)
Its pretty cool, can sketch, take pics, vote.
learn by doing (Score:3)
There comes a point where learning-by-doing runs into some serious obstacles - maybe just fine for newtonian physics but a hands on quantum mechanics demo might take a lot of setup. When I was a student there were labs for the stuff that could be set up in a reasonable time, lectures need not be tethered to what the school has equipment or time to do.
As someone else points out, the lecturer is key to the whole thing, Feynman sure had it down to an art, if ever there was a good argument to try to get into a top flight university it's the existence of teachers of that calibre
Wow factor (Score:2)
That episode of The Mechanical Universe certainly was engaging and interesting. But educational? It was a bit light on content. At the end of the episode, I'd come away entertained. But not so much educated. And should some poor student get lost halfway through on some detail, how would they go about asking a question?
Perhaps episode #1 wasn't the best example of this series, it only being the introduction. But I get the feeling that this series is targeted at people who need the Hollywood production value
I slept. (Score:2)
I slept through most of every lecture in college. I'd listen until I got the gist of the day's topic, and then sleep on my desk – in the front row. The hub-bub after class would wake me, and I'd ask someone what the homework was. Then I'd go home and do it.
The professors didn't seem to mind, since I was usually at or near the top of every test. In fact, at the end of second freshman semester, a Professor offered me a job as a lab assistant! Great experience (despite my being a notorious sleeper
Re: Couldn't Happen Fast Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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Students learn differently. Some respond to visual learning methods. Some to auditory methods. Some respond best to experiment. The point being, instructor input is vital. During a lecture, the instructor can see the "deer in the headlights" look, and adjust the instruction style and content appropriately. Videos can't do that. Self-study only works with brilliant, entirely self-motivated individuals, and those are rare indeed.
You explain the exact reason modern and near-future technology is necessary to solve our education problems. It is incredibly inefficient for a human teacher to adjust his teaching style for each of 20+ students in his class. And adjusting for a few struggling students at the expense of the other 15? Is that really your ideal solution?
There is no reason we couldn't have 1000+ video lessons for any given topic; each slightly different. Periodic 3-5 question quizzes would be able to tell how well students are
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Nope. The ideal solution is to encourage teachers/professors to specialize in teaching to a specific mode of learning, and encourage students to pick the teachers that best s
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Nope. The ideal solution is to encourage teachers/professors to specialize in teaching to a specific mode of learning, and encourage students to pick the teachers that best suit their preferred learning styles.
You must haven went to very large schools, but many if not most kids don't have that luxury. Many students have just one or two science / math / etc. teachers for their entire grade. And there probably aren't enough kids to segregate them into groups of similar skill levels in each subject. One of the benefits of virtual classrooms would be you having tens of millions of fellow students and hundreds of thousands of teachers to pull from.
A video lesson is still fundamentally a lecture. Students that learn better by hearing and seeing will do well with any well-crafted lecture, but students that learn better by doing won't.
Who says it would be just lectures? I carefully used the word "lesson"
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I don't want to watch damn videos! Speaking is an incredibly slow way to transfer information. I can read at least an order of magnitude faster than you can talk.
If you're going to have videos, then you also need to provide written material covering the same topics.
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I can read at least an order of magnitude faster than you can talk.
Standard lectures are spoken at about 145-160 words per minute, while average readers read at about 200 words per minute. Considering most lectures are very watchable at 1.25x speed, the average lecture can be listened to at about the same speed as you can read similar content. Even if you are twice the speed of average readers, which is quite possible, you would be nowhere near an order of magnitude faster.
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There is no reason we couldn't have 1000+ video lessons for any given topic; each slightly different. Periodic 3-5 question quizzes would be able to tell how well students are picking up the material, and machine learning could help identify which lessons work better for each student based on billions of other student interactions and learning results.
Exactly this. Start cutting down the ones that don't work. Eventually you'll probably have half a dozen lectures that target a particular learning style.
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During a lecture, the instructor can see the "deer in the headlights" look, and adjust the instruction style and content appropriately.
You can edit a video and upload the revision pending feedback. Nobody is saying that education should become a one-way process, but that on-demand, pausable video is a much more efficient way to handle the bulk of knowledge transfer than, say, one guy in front of a 200-student lecture hall. That threshold is probably much lower--maybe somewhere north of 20.
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Exactly wrong. Live lectures can be quite good or very bad. Recorded live lectures (or recorded anything else) are always bad. People often love the videos, but research shows that even if you enjoy the video it's more likely to reinforce your erroneous preconceptions rather than teach you something new.
Lectures are a compromise between efficiency of delivery and optimum knowledge transfer. They're not the best at either, but they seem to achieve an optimum tradeoff.
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Here's a rebuttal from a former lecturer: your point is stupid.
I'm well pissed innit and not a lecturer any more, so I really can't be arsed to say more.
Cheers! :)
Ps don't drink and reply, it's a bloody terrible idea
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At least one person has done his PhD doing exactly that. Outcome? The videos were more likely to reinforce preexisting erroneous beliefs than they were to teach new concepts.
That's right, watching educational videos, on average, has a negative effect.
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Pre existing erroneous beliefs? I don't think my students had and beliefs at all about critical sections before the lectures, never mind erroneous ones!
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Most of my slides have no text on them, at all. It annoys the hell out of a couple percent of the audience. Everyone else loves it.
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You forgot colonization.
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And such a system is bound to produce worthless degrees. You must ask a lot of your students and then fail all those that cannot even produce a reasonable approximation to the level of understanding and insight you require. That way you make sure only those that have it pass, and that the degree means something. Memorizing some facts is part of the deal, bit it should never be enough to pass on its own.
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In the age of "safe spaces" and students that think they do not have to change anything about their world-view, that is unfortunately wrong. Sure, education worth the name will not carter to this utterly demented trend, but if the customer wants a really bad education that makes them feel good, that product will be what the majority of suppliers will offer.
In an actual university course, if anybody is "triggered", the goal will be to make them able to handle that, not to avoid doing it as that only turns th
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The acceleration of the expansion of the universe was discovered, and gravitational waves actually observed? Other than that, I don't know what you're talking about. A lot of discoveries of subatomic particles, but most of them were already theorized to exist.