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'The Traditional Lecture Is Dead' (wired.com)
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 But it is an outdated idea (free pass for adblockers).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.
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.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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).
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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 setup loaded with H5P. 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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