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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 But it is an outdated idea (free pass for adblockers).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.
Who is to say that because this method of education has been used for eons it is not longer valid? Why? In fact, I'd argue completely the opposite: it has survived numerous challenges. Maybe it is as good as it gets and the problem is that education reaches a broader audience that does not interact well with learning. Proof: Trump got elected even though it is going to crap on all the people who voted for him and that was widely known... But... when you have a population that is 50% stupid (being generous here) then you get what you get.
But traditional lectures simply aren't effective. Research shows students don't learn by hearing or seeing,
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.
The traditional lecture needs to die, and modern technology now allows that to happen. Students are much better off if the lecturer just records the lecture and puts it on Youtube (or on the University distribution network). Classroom lectures are almost always inefficient, boring, and ineffective. They've been the vehicle of choice for so long only because Youtube didn't exist, or hadn't filled out yet.
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. 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!
That video is crap. Wow is it slow. Nothing conveyed either.
There's nothing wrong with (and nothing better than) a lecture by an inspiring teacher, particularly on a subject of interest.
Because it's just not entertaining enough to keep people with the attention span of gnats engaged.
There, fixed that for you.
So is this at a school that didn't have a physics lab component to complement the lecture? I can see how current students would find the lecture hard if they haven't done the reading first. I always got the most benefit from the lecture by reading the text before, Attempting a few homework problems or examples and then bringing my understanding and questions for the lecture. Then taking the lecture info and applying it in the lab to get a good feel for the concepts.
Because the textbook is supposed to have much more detail than what the teacher can provide.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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, its just the difference between a lecture and a recitation. they are just calling it flip lessons now (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). Lectures are not really dead, it just makes more sense to have the best lecturer do it and then interact with the students in the classroom.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
But seriously, I instructed physics in a public school setting for a couple years and I agree that lectures are almost useless, but that is just one small part of what is wrong with our education system. If you have cultivated genuine interest in a student, either by media or hands on exercises, they will listen to a lecture (but most likely turn it into a discussion, which is better).
Spitwad coming your way !!
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.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
"some of the old style practitioners were bad (cite subject socially considered esoteric and challenging) so the new idea is better"
No, that is not how it works.
You can run an experiment and say, "given 1h of time with A instructors or B video, group B's standardized subject test was a standard deviation higher, retaining the shape of the distribution."
But you can't say, "I had a bad physics prof, so we should all watch videos instead."
Science, bitches. You lack education in it evidently, but want to dictate how to teach it? Go LEARN before you try to mandate teaching methods. And then CHECK whether your ideas make sense by experimenting. There are decades of research on various didactic methods, some of it is great stuff, and there's room to contribute if you think your particular way of comparing video to live might provide something new. You'll maybe notice, as you look to see if it's been done and replicated already, that the other video vs. live studies have shown that video learning was worse. Maybe the format - some of these were VHS studies! - matters; maybe newer, faster videos might have more punch per minute. Go forth and perform science!
No lecturer I know did that. Maybe Rhett does it when he lectures, but the ones I know, and the good teachers at school (and, indeed, the good speakers at a conference) all use the board to display what they're doing but they're doing it there, right there, live, not just reading what's up on the board.
Corporations are replete with people who use powerpoint slides PRECISELY that way. And it really is a terrible thing. Might as well fuck off, hand out the notes, wait for people to read it then ask questions. Or not bother turning up at all.
But GOOD powerpoint slides are an aid to the talk, just like the blackboard is for a good lecturer (or indeed even the mediocre ones I know of) or teacher do it like that.
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.
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.
So, the style of the physics lab that had been standard for at least 40 years now? I have not had any type of hard science class that has not involved at least some partial hands-on demonstration semi-regularly. In some classes, it was formalized as a regular lab session. In others it took the form of interactive days that might require a parent's signature on a form to indicate that you do know some simple basics about using blades and are not allergic to squid blood.
I see commercials about how horrible it is for schools to cut back their music classes, but no one seems to stand up for the wood shop, metal shop, home economics and science labs when those get cut. People who think I should recognize them talk about how music brings enlightenment, while standing in front of a crowd of students who don't know how to scramble an egg or screw a couple boards together to make a simple shelf, and no one in the room has any clue how to budget.
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.
"Millennials suck at reading and have no attention span. Why can't education be more like watching YouTube?"
Isn't this why you have a physics lab? I thought this was going in the direction of VR interactive multimedia experiences filled with the latest buzzwords, but the summary just describes lab exercises. Lectures are (ideally) interactive exchanges of information where students can get enough understanding to be able to use the textbook effectively as a reference; only bad teachers regurgitate the textbook during lecture. If you just don't get a key concept, reading the book cover to cover will get you nowhere. That's where lectures and office hours come in, getting you past the gaps in your understanding that keep you from acquiring the knowledge in the book. And then there's this:
Research shows students don't learn by hearing or seeing, they learn by doing, a model often called active learning.
In reality, students learn differently. Some students learn more from seeing, some learn more from hearing, and some only learn through participatory demonstrations. One method will not work for everyone, which is why you have a professional educator there. Look, I get it, playing around in class is fun. But there's a theoretical context that you just don't get from "active learning" alone. That's what the lecture is for. It's not either/or, you need both parts, which is why these sorts of classes have lectures and labs. If you're going to get rid of anything, ditch the textbooks and find a free digital source for the reference material.
Speaking as a physics professor who has tried many of these new techniques - I've done video lectures which are up on YouTube, in-class tutorials, clickers etc. - I get really annoyed by this type of hyperbolic promotions of them. Technology has indeed given us some better ways of doing things and in that the OP is right that we should explore and use them. However, somethings are best taught in the more traditional lecture format and frankly, when I was a student myself we were all supposed to read around the subject - not just limited to reading the textbook but other books too - as well as attend the lecture so this is hardly a "new idea".
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.
wooo
Pretty hard to get many professors to change their ways otherwise.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
Lectures are part of the white privilege system in universities. White Privilege. White people want minorities to be confused so they create racist books and racist classes and then they make everything racist. Racism! Race Ism. If you have a lecture, you have a racist. Racist! Racists can't teach, they can only hate. The lectures are pure hate. Hate lectures of racist racists racing towards racism.
Join me now and condemn this racist racism of the the racist racists and their racist system of racist racism. Racism: Not even once
While I agree with what is being said, there is one fundamental flaw, many students won't read the textbook before showing up to class. Teachers can't force them to do it, and in some school boards teachers can't even mark a student on whether or not they did their homework. This is based on experiences from my wife who is a high school math and physics teacher in Ontario.
30+ year old Physics material is your recommendation to counter current bad classroom lecture! Really? I was actually intrigued by the referral until I saw the copywrite date.
Guess how much has changed in Physics, especially Astrophysics, in 30 years? That CalTech material might as well be flat-earth howto's
I lecture CS courses such optimizing compilers and C. Lectures are very effective since I can probe the audience what they understand or need a different explanation of. They can ask me at any time. Confusions are removed. Of course it needs flexibility to adapt the lecture to what the students ask something about.
Playing a video instead of a human given lecture is just ridiculous.
The lecturer can understand what the students understand by asking them questions or looking at their faces.
Of course books and lectures and hacking all complement each other.
Tradtional lectures are better when:
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 the authority figures to grow their own knowledge, ask questions, etc.
> 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?
Any college course, any professional school, listening to professors drone on about what you could learn from printed matter, and taking time away from printed matter, while having confused, often dumb students asking questions that you aren't having problems with is certainly sub-optimal.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Demonstrations and fancy graphics may work for inspiring middle school kids .. but fact is that most of the time the hard sciences except maybe microbiology require you to know calculus. You can't learn it by watching a video any more than you can learn to play the piano by watching a Liberace video. Math and the hard sciences are a brain skill similar to gymnastics or guitar. Your mind has to be trained and it has to get that via practice. And yesLl
Some people may need less practice than others. A non traditional lecture isn't going to improve the situation, if you want to do STEM at some point you are going to need to face the fact there is no way around the difficult parts.
Go to Wikipedia. The basis of Mechanical Universe is a series of Caltech Freshman Physics lectures by David Goodstein wrapped around what was then state of the art graphics segments to convey the material.
I was there, Caltech class of 85. Goodstein was an excellent lecturer. He put massive effort into constructing his lectures and the Mechanical Universe content.
what could possibly go wrong?
For me, forming a relationship with a professor was always a critical part of my University education. I had better outcomes in smaller classes with professors and classmates that I established a rapport with because I was more engaged and the communication was enhanced by face-to-face interaction and the creation of a safe and inclusive learning environment. I find that my personal academic education was more a state of mind then a process and that that state was reinforced both by the institutional setting where other people came to participate in education in the same way I did along with a confident professor that set the tone for the course.
Lectures, videos, and textbooks are forms of passive learning. A student will listen or read the information without receiving feedback or being forced to engage with the material. It has its place in education but as the article states it is less effective. There is even evidence that passive learning provides an "illusion of learning." That is a student believes they understand material when in fact they do not.
Active learning is learning by doing. There have been numerous studies demonstrating that active learning is superior. It can be as simple as asking students questions about the content they are learning. Active learning is one of the reasons why expert tutors are the best form of education (See 2 Sigma Problem). By being forced to answer questions a student will be better able to retain and recall it.
Lectures and other passive learning methodologies have their place, but they should be short and supplemental.
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.
My kids hate (HATE!) Kahn Academy... it's even more boring than a lecture. MY kids loved Horrible History... but the lessons are not organized in a historical flow, just selected fun bits.
Flip classes seem to be working for math and biology... They watch the video lecture the night before to see the basics and then class time is all questions, conversations, and hands-on stuff.
I'll check your Mechanical Universe, but nothing I've seen so far comes close to what you can learn by interacting with the teacher.
"No way that is more engaging or interesting than an episode of The Mechanical Universe..."
Being "engaged" and "interested" can help with learning, but the goal of education is to learn how to think, not just to be entertained.
>"...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.
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.
Summary of Summary: Students now assumed to have attention spans and concentration skills of goldfish.
More importantly ... (hey, where'd everyone go?)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
How do you make students do anything? Realistically, you can't fail them all. Especially if student ratings are a part of promotion and tenure evaluations.
This is NOT limited to any particular domain (I see it with Computing). Language barriers (educators not being native language speakers) further exacerbate the problem.
Some of the folk I know who struggle to learn new concepts/approaches actually excelled at the traditional college rote memorization lectures. That is, they did well at exams, but in spite of a degree in/related to software, they are incapable of writing reasonably (stress on "REASONABLY") usable code.
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 already have too many people getting worthless degrees because it was to easy to get them. The last thing we want is to make it even easier.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Remote courses were going to replace classwork. Doing was going to replace learning. Write less, do more was going to solve everything
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.
Interesting that the writers says that noone learns by reading, hearing, and seeing, since that's the way I learn best.
Was Turbomachinery my senior year of college. The prof was outstanding as a lecturer, and there was no book. You just purchased his notes from the local copy place and it was far cheaper. He taught from the notes and there was plenty of space to write in material. We got hands on instruction designing gas turbine blades using computer software. Have never had a class where I learned more in one semester, and wanted to attend every lecture. I put in the most effort in learning the material of any class.
There were a couple of others like it - once I got to the senior level electives and the profs were teaching their area of research. But I can imagine teaching physics 101 every year must be a fucking drag.
When I close my eyes and picture a Physics lecture, I DO SEE David Goodstein give another funny, entertaining, informative and inspirational lecture.
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.
Did you envision The Best Physics Lecture EVAR?
My physics professor once threw the textbook across the room because it had an error in it. Sometimes he would lob tennis balls at sleeping students. So yes, I did envision "The Best Physics Lecture EVAR"!
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
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Several professors where I did grad school used Visual Classrooms (https://visualclassrooms.com) to capture in-class discussions and group work.
Its pretty cool, can sketch, take pics, vote.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
If you've got 300+ kids in a class, or even 60+ you're not getting a lot of interaction. Nobody's gonna want to speak up and bring the whole thing to a halt. And with more and more cuts to education coming because nobody wants to pay for it expect class sizes like that. My Kid's senior year in high school she didn't have enough chairs and often had to stand in class. There were 45 of them packed in there. Of course, I'm sure at expensive private schools it's not like that...
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they learn best with plenty of teacher/student interaction. That's your labs. But they're really, really expensive and nobody wants to pay the taxes for them (we're all Taxed to the Max, you see). So we're talking about crap like this instead of the elephant in the room that is underfunded education.
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 life of poverty.
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Seems the person who wrote the piece never took a Physics class. A good Physics professor will go over material from the book that needs more explanation or better derivation. Physics books are notoriously light on explanation and derivation. The phrase, "obvious to the most casual observer" is used quite often.
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
Nullius in verba
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 values to think that something is valuable.
Have gnu, will travel.
And this is ANOTHER bullshit article that must have been written by a millennial without a brain. Okay, that's a bit redundant as millennials don't have brains, as we all know. Okay, again, my bad. Those who have had to 'work' with them knows that millennials don't have a brain and can only play with their finger dildos, also known as cell phones.
What is traditional reading? It is a model of learning in which a book 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 book presenting the reading called a book, because way back before the internet and even the printing press, a book would literally be a book so students could read it.
Now, don't get me wrong. The traditional reading model worked wonderfully for eons. But it is an outdated idea for millenials (free pass for adblockers).
Close your eyes and imagine yourself as a millenial in a college physics course with a book giving a traditional reading. Now open your eyes. Did you envision The Best Physics reading EVAR? I doubt it. You probably pictured a book droning on and on in front of you. No way that is more engaging or interesting than an episode of Empire, and if you're a book who uses traditional readings, just stop and play the show instead. Everyone will be better off.
You may think by now that I think most physics books are dolts. I promise that's not the case. But traditional reading simply isn't effective for millenials. Research shows that millenials are completely incapable of learning by hearing or seeing, they only learn by being entertained, a model often called early childhood education. Physics books should start thinking about how they can go beyond just a traditional reading. There are some easy things they can do (or millenials can ask them to do) to make learning more engaging. First, make millenials read the book outside of class, rather than in class. If your reading merely covers the material in the textbook, why make millenials buy the textbook when they can download it free? Now, you may put a different spin on the material, but still. You're merely repeating what millenials can read on their own. Let them do that on their own time, and use the classroom for texting and gaming and so forth.
Students learn best by doing. So students should do.
The problem is that his model assumes students do nothing outside of class (which is, in my experience, true). On the other hand, students who can be arsed to give a damn seem to do quite well. Why? They do something.
Professor's job is to teach. Students' job is to learn. Professor can teach, but if the student refuses to make any effort to learn, they may as well fuck off because it's a waste of their time. Learning takes effort, which is why most people fail at it across the board.
Some of us, slashdot notwithstanding, learn best by conversation.
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 in his class, sometimes dropping the book off onto the floor).
The in-class sleeping continued into graduate school, where again I'd nod off after a bit in almost every lecture, but then set the curve when it came test-time. Am I some kind of miracle? No––I studied outside of class, and did more than the assigned homework problems, when necessary. Or ask for help when needed––no professor but one ever got pissed when I came to office hours.
This was in the physical sciences and engineering. YMMV.
My personal recommendation as a teacher. Record the lectures assign them as homework and use the class for discussion, to work problems, and to do lab work.
Even a dimmy can read about twice as fast as someone (modulo racing commentators & auctioneers) can speak. Lectures are plain inefficient.
If you're stuck you ask your mates or you bring it up in the Q&A session. That's what they're for.
Lazy would be not having any contact hours at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It is axiomatic that the effectiveness of the lecture depends on the lecturer. Not every professor is a star, but I still remember many of the best lecturers from my university days 40 years later. And often when I am learning something new these notables, whose effect on me lingers still, continue to inform my intellectual development. For example I learned to speak Russian quite well later in life. And as I progressed I often thought when I heard myself gabbling away in Russian, "Damn! If only my old Russian professor Lehrman could hear me now." Learning owes much to motivation. And a great performer at the chalk board showing off can produce wonder in his audience. This triggers a desire to delve more deeply into the subject at hand in an active manner. It is a human thing.
Moreover, the best lecturers always posed questions and encouraged participation -- Socratic teaching. We become moved to display to these role models our own enthusiasm and progress. So, though I kind of agree that the lecture method is limited as a way to actually impart information and to transfer information -- programmed instruction and laboratory work are better at this -- I disagree that the lecture is dead. It is in the lecture that the instructor challenges and inspires. She or he sets an example of erudition to be emulated.
But I will end where I began by confessing that this does depend on the lecturer. And, if they merely phone in their time at the chalkboard, then they can actually do more harm than good. When I drew those people I usually just dropped their classes if I could.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Wired Magazine? A Physics Professor? Funny, I didn't know you needed to be an even adequate teacher in order to be an Associate Professor. Who died and made his opinion on the subject authoritative? Active learning takes what? 10X to 100X the time needed for covering the same amount in a lecture? I've watched all of Susskind's (Stanford) Bare Minimum lectures and he is truly a gifted lecturer. After going through a lot of the same material on my own, his ability to cover it so succinctly is not only amazing, but something that obviously took a LOT of work to produce. You would think that something we've been doing for literally tens of thousands of years (educating our young) we'd have perfected, yet we don't have a clue. I recall a study showing that while lectures are one of the least popular modes of teaching, that retention 5 or 10 years later was far higher with students who learned the material that way, rather than the alternatives they tested. "Educational Theory" now days is mostly flavor of the month. Anyone can make up some silly approach, and with a motivated and energetic/enthusiastic teacher, assuming s/he has a solid grasp of the subject, can do much better than some random "control". I'd be interested to find out how you teach, say, least squares regression, without lectures. Are books really "good enough"? I don't think so. In my graduate school days, I treasured the lectures, because I got someone skilled in the art's take on the theory. Its the stuff that virtually never gets into the textbooks that can really help with understanding. Some material is better taught visually, some better with audio, some by presentation (power point), some by derivation (chalk board), some by smell, some by taste, some by feel, some by kinesthetics, most by more than one approach. Is there any question that learning from an enthusiastic teacher beats the alternatives? So, my question about "active learning", which the STEM educational oldboys have hitched their horses to, is how is quality controlled? This reminds me of the days where my kids were made to "tutor" the slower learners in the classroom. The theory was that both the slow learner and the higher achievers learned the material better that way. Turns out, studies failed to show much benefit to either group, and clearly showed that the high achievers were slowed down due to the lowest common denominator effect. My guess is that this Associate Professor thinks he has better things to do with his time than prepare a well thought out, well structured lecture, and is engaging in massive confirmation bias reasoning. As has been said, homework is "active learning", and so is laboratory work that accompanies the main lecture series. There's nothing "new" or different about either of those. The real question is, given that there is a fairly well defined body of knowledge to be presented in a single term of almost all undergraduate classes, why should hundreds and hundreds of PhDs spend hundreds of hours each year preparing the same material - often with inferior results? What we need is more TA's (or postdocs) to answer the "phoned in" questions with regard to a video course. It should be obvious that this model can't accommodate free courses, someone has to pay for the video film preparation AND the Q&As, not to mention homework correction. Pay to Play, baby.
If bored, I speed up the YouTube video to X1.25: still audible, less boring. Not an order of magnitude faster, but helpful for me.
Most of the material in higher texts and papers is the same thing you would see in a series of lectures or lecture respectively, with the added benefit of large tables, glossaries, and indices, and such.
Not only that one who is not a gifted reader may benefit from lectures longer-term by learning how to handle high-level materials with training provided by lectures.
So, are books and texts archaic/bad too?
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.
You bet.
"Lecture" is a French word that means a "reading". In fact, this cleans up why a lecture is called a lecture in English for me. Thanks.
I fully agree with these statements and would argue that sex education should also be taught via active learning methods.
I had a math teacher for calculus who would start the class assigning half the students to go to the black board (we had a lot of blackboard real estate) , give them one problem of the homework and put their solution on the black board. He would then give each student the opportunity to explain his or her solution. He would never make negative comments if you didn't have it correct, but instead would work through it with the student. Most students got the problem right, so he would briefly make a comment and go on to the next. It really gave you the motivation for doing your homework plus he learned about each student. This lasted for about half the class time, the second part he would lecture on the new work we were expected to learn. Our class size was about 30 students. I got to know my classmates better and felt more motivated than in any other classes.
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?
No..... Students don't need your class to read the Textbook. Why don't you just say "Read this book as a pre-requisite before taking this class" then,
and then just give them the A after they do a book report? People take courses, because Textbooks aren't engaging either --- they're even dryer than the lectures often, AND it is difficult to maintain attention to the task of reading material, which you may be overwhelmed by surely by the wall of text.
If you assign students to read something, make sure it is 5 pages per day or less --- Bite-sized pieces.
It's totally valid to have Lectures where you teach All the material in the book in a relatable fashion, and that is what should be done.
Don't try to make your students to DO something different, or something massive to teach every topic --- that is unreasonable and will wear them out.
A good lecture should be "spiced up" though with humor and flavors, involve asking students questions, and require active participation.
No matter what method was used while I was in college, I still flunked out anyway.
Now that young folks have stopped being able to read an entire book on any given topic... it stands to reason that they would be unable to listen to one person discussing a any given topic for longer than 15 minutes. We are all becoming ADD.
Thanks, Associate Professor Rhett Allain. I figured this out 30 years ago.
Passive learning bad, active learning good. Information retention good!
Next up, I expect to hear from AP Allain that comfy chairs are superior to uncomfortable chairs. Progress abounds!
> First, make students read the book outside of class, rather than in class.
I laughed out loud at this part.
The lecture is dead because nobody cares what you learned in school. Employers care how you preform at work. That's what matters. My opinion is that the best workers are not those who have lots of knowledge, but those who know how to find new knowledge. And that knowledge does not come from a book.
Those who learn how to find and do something totally new and do it quickly will be top performers. Teachers should teach how to find information and the apply it. Because no matter what they teach and no matter which books they use... it will be outdated or irrelevant to their jobs. Knowledge on how to search is the key.
The labs aren't generally now zero weight
The labs were never zero weight nor have I heard of anywhere in any country where they are zero. We were talking about assignments i.e. questions students take home to practice the material not a lab where they are learning completely different skills on experimental techniques.