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Vermont Medical School Says Goodbye To Lectures (npr.org)
The University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine has begun phasing out lectures in favor of what's known as "active learning" and plans to be done with lectures altogether by 2019. NPR spoke with William Jeffries, a dean at the school who's leading the effort, about the thinking behind this move. From the report: Why are lectures bad? Well, I wouldn't say that they're bad. The issue is that there is a lot of evidence that lectures are not the best way to accumulate the skills needed to become a scientist or a physician. We've seen much evidence in the literature, accumulated in the last decade, that shows that when you do a comparison between lectures and other methods of learning -- typically called "active learning" methods -- that lectures are not as efficient or not as successful in allowing students to accumulate knowledge in the same amount of time.
Give us an example of a topic taught in a traditional lecture versus an "active learning" setting. A good example would be the teaching of what we would call pharmacokinetics -- the science of drug delivery. So, how does a drug get to the target organ or targeted receptor? A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is simply mathematical equations. If you have a lecture, it's simply presenting those equations and maybe giving examples of how they work. In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there. And when you get into the classroom setting, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic problems. Cases are presented where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and you're looking at the action of that over time and the concentration of the drug in the blood. So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.
Give us an example of a topic taught in a traditional lecture versus an "active learning" setting. A good example would be the teaching of what we would call pharmacokinetics -- the science of drug delivery. So, how does a drug get to the target organ or targeted receptor? A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is simply mathematical equations. If you have a lecture, it's simply presenting those equations and maybe giving examples of how they work. In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there. And when you get into the classroom setting, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic problems. Cases are presented where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and you're looking at the action of that over time and the concentration of the drug in the blood. So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.
The medium that best suits a person's ability to learn varies a lot from person to person. For me, easily the worst way to absorb and understand information is verbally (reading is the best by orders of magnitude). I've always found lectures to be a complete waste of time because of that.
But I'm not in favor of getting rid of lectures because there are a lot of people for whom it's the best way for them to absorb information.
Ideally, lectures would be available for those who can benefit from them, but optional so that people like me, for whom they are a total waste of time, can learn the same things in way the better suits them.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I agree with more emphasis on lab, and less emphasis on lecture... but dumping lectures, jumping straight to the lab and expecting students learn about X before they show up is just idiotic.
I'll see you on that and raise ya several thousands of $$$. The UVM Medical-Industrial complex hbas been swallowing up healthcare facilities around the state and threatening independent providers to our detriment. Meanwhile, as this state-sanctioned monopoly blossoms it becomes harder and harder to get the simplest of procedures without going through a UVM facility - which costs a fortune. https://vtdigger.org/2017/07/3...
It is no coincidence that Vermont is among the top ten most expensive places to buy health insurance: http://www.npr.org/sections/he...
I remember reading some book which predicted that with the advent of the internet schools would become mainly about learning social etiquette and learning how to learn. Far too many people seem to think these are inborn talents. I guess since this is a med school they might have some justification in assuming their students have by now gleaned how to self teach, but I dunno. You can go a lifetime without anyone taking you aside and explaining this stuff.
The best teaching technique I've ever seen was that practiced by the Bible Study Fellowship back in the 1980s. All the material was broken down into 1-week chunks. You started with reading assignments and an outline that you did on your own. This was followed by a weekly small-group discussion where the group collectively answered a series of questions on the same material. This was followed by a lecture of the whole fellowship. The lecture was now very interesting, because you had personally worked through the material, worked with others to process it and cover the bits you didn't get on your own, and now you had some appreciation of what you were dealing with.
I adopted that pattern for every course I've ever had to teach, and the retention is phenomenal, 90% and higher.
My opinion is it worked so well because:
- Same material, multiple processing methods (reading, writing, talking, listening)
- Same material, multiple repetitions
- Your FIRST introduction to the material is personal. That increases "ownership".
- Questions answered BY a small group invite collaboration and sharing
There you have it.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I'm always wary of anything involving group work. A typical group consists of me doing all the work, maybe one other person helping me, and two or three slackers doing fuck-all. So why should I have to share my good grade with the slackers who didn't do (or learn) jack shit?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Specifically, we tried to get colleges and universities to adopt new methods of andragogy in addition to lecture.
The reason is that for most students lecture isn't very effective. Their retention drops of rapidly as the lecture gets longer, to the point where when you are approaching the 1 hour mark almost nobody is retaining anything being said. Basically long lectures are a huge waste of a lot of people's time.
It's also important to understand that students are different from each other in their learning strengths and weaknesses. I, for example, can sit in a lecture hall for hours on end and remember almost everything. I'm an oddball. People like me have traditionally been seen as "bright", but life experience has taught me that I'm not *that* much smarter than most of the people around me. What I and people like me am are, is unusually good at retaining lecture material. That's a massive advantage in a lecture-based educational system.
Don't get me wrong. Being an information sponge is a tremendous asset in real life. But I think academia over-selects for people like me, and makes people who don't happen to have this peculiar talent work harder for the same results.
But a more diverse way of teaching would also benefit oddballs like me. When people talk about "learning styles" they usually mean "I shouldn't be forced to learn in ways that are hard for me." Actually, you should be challenged to learn in ways that don't come naturally to you, just not 100% of the time. It's important to become a versatile learner, able to adapt to the situation. Playing to your strength all the time is limiting.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've had great teachers who walked me through the material and made me understand it. I've had bad teachers who pretty much cribbed from the textbook and couldn't answer questions. Guess which ones took attendance every class and demoted you when you weren't there?
See, what we do is expect these students, post-baccalaureate students, to read and understand the material before the "class". (The class can be viewed as a test of understanding). It turns out that if the students learn the material before class, then the result is that the material is learned better than with a lecture (to mostly unprepared students). Who knew?
... in this man's Navy, ca. 1968.
We studied the shit out of troubleshooting techniques and then walked into a lab that had a slew of defective radios, caused by tampering by the instructors.
We applied the methods we learned out of class to these "real," situations and discussed successes/failures in pinpointing the defects.
Lecturea were boring .
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Plenty of lectures on there about really anything.
[($)]
Yep. This is what you do in the LAB portion of the course. Typically you have a lecture course, taken concurrently with a lab course.
You are expected to have read the material before you show up to the lecture. The instructor explains the difficult or confusing bits and tries to give you a sense of when/how you will be using the information. Afterwards you go to the lab and work the problems / step thru simplified tasks that use the information covered in the text and the lecture.
Skipping the lecture portion is not an improvement.
Listen to any lecture by Leonard Susskind and tell me that lectures can't be extremely helpful. I imagine there are professors in every field who are as amazing at elucidating topics. I suspect this is a pernicious way for the school to deprecate professors and their wages. Regardless of their stated reasons, I'm certain that this was done to save money, and not to make better students.
Active learning is a provably superior form of learning. Active learning is actually a harder form of learning in that in requires more work from both student and teacher. The student has to solve problems, and the teacher has to provide constructive feedback and help the student self-correct. It is one of the reasons why the averaged tutored student performs in the 98 percentile (See 2 Sigma Problem). That is why these doctors and scientists are implementing it in their school.
Passive learning is less effective even if it is given from a great lecturer. In fact a great lecturer can provide an "illusion of learning" which is a sense that a student understands the material better then they actually do. Passive learning includes sitting in a lecture, watching videos and reading textbooks.
Think about it with a simple algebra example. If a student watches a video of someone solving an equation they will learn something, but they will learn more if they are required to solve a dozen equations.
So in other words, they have no solution to accelerate the initial process of learning the material, so they just shovel that responsibility entirely onto the student.
Learning is, and always has been, entirely the student's responsibility: a professor cannot learn the material for you! The responsibility of a university is to provide the best possible environment and resources to enable and encourage students to learn as well as to assess what they have learnt.
The idea with these techniques is that students learn the simple concepts by themselves because they can and this allows instructors to spend their time teaching the harder concepts which students need help understanding. The other benefit is that these techniques force students into thinking about concepts they may find very challenging whereas in a lecture format students can "write-off" challenging topics as too hard by tuning out and just accept they will take a hit on exams for these topics.
That's the theory. Where we have to be careful is that a lot (but not all) of these new techniques are also far less "dense" i.e. you end up spending a lot more time on each topic so you cover less. Even a traditional lecture format should show an improvement in understanding if you go through things more slowly and demand less of students. So while I think that these techniques are better when adapting courses you have to be careful not to also dumb-down the course by removing material.
I'm always wary of anything involving group work. A typical group consists of me doing all the work, maybe one other person helping me, and two or three slackers doing fuck-all. So why should I have to share my good grade with the slackers who didn't do (or learn) jack shit?
Because the students actively working through the examples are the ones doing most of the learning. The others are destined to become chiropractors or hospital administrators.
Nonsense, diversity does not benefit anyone. And ther are no any different learning styles etc. It's all bs. There are people that can learn, and to learn from a person is way easier tha from a textbook alone.
Then there are the diversity people that cannot learn at all. Dispensing with lecturer means that the diversity people lose nothing but people able to learn do. And group work is just a waste of time because each has to grasp the material on its own, by applying effort, not by yanking in a group of random people.
I think the larger trend is that lectures are moving to video, and class time is thereby freed up for Q&A (both directions, so some "Socratic" from the professor), discussion, and various other interactive things. The best part about video is that if you can follow it at 1.0x speed you can probably follow it at 1.6x speed, and when you can't follow it there is the rewind button.
.. because who the fuck has an attention span any more? Certainly not the people we're teaching to do your urinary catheters and minor laparoscopic procedures!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Nonsense, diversity does not benefit anyone. And ther are no any different learning styles etc. It's all bs. There are people that can learn, and to learn from a person is way easier tha from a textbook alone.
Then there are the diversity people that cannot learn at all. Dispensing with lecturer means that the diversity people lose nothing but people able to learn do. And group work is just a waste of time because each has to grasp the material on its own, by applying effort, not by yanking in a group of random people.
Are you a native English speaker?
I ask because what you typed shows that you do not understand the words that you used in your reply.
In my day (1980s) we did lecture and lab. For lecture, you prepared ahead by reading material and thinking about it. Lecture was effective because you had an idea what was going on and ideas got enforced and expanded upon, and we were always welcome to interact with the lecture and ask questions (a monologue lecture is definitely not good). Finally, labs wrapped up the material and reinforced what we were learning. I guess I was lucky to go through an "active learning" process.
At the university where I teach, certain high level administrators keep pushing this crap, telling us to stop lecturing. Two observations:
From TFS: "In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there."
Maybe that works at a medical school At the undergraduate level, most of the class will show up unprepared. At best, maybe they skimmed the material, certainly they have not invested enough time to understand it.
From TFS: In place of the lecture, "cases are presented"
Which sounds a lot like a lecture. Where's the "active learning"? Students are supposed to be doing stuff themselves. Having pre-prepared cases presented to them is not "active".
Programming ought to be ideal for active learning. It would be, if the majority of students were motivated enough to study materialbefore coming to class. Reality intervenes: too few bachelor's students are that mature and that organized.
The best compromise I have found is to lecture the first half of the period, and help students work on exercises during the second half. Our periods are 3-4 hours, and no one wants a lecture that long anyway. But the next administrator who comes along and tells me to stop lecturing entirely needs to catch one upside the head.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This is a very old idea. The flipped classroom is better but it does not do away with lectures, it just puts them on the inter/intranet so that they are pulled up as a resource when required. Group work actually helps students understand far more but the lectures become like books that you can refer to and listen to the parts that you want rather than being forced to wade through the whole things.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
The school actually says that they decided to ditch lectures because they read literature that says they're less successful? You'd think being a school they might say "we tried different methods, and this new one works best." If educated students is what their business produces, then they might ought to measure the results in order to have quality control on their production. If they can't point to their QC to show that the new method works better, they should be providing a discount price for their newly inferior service.
Instead of learn it in the classroom, and then use it at home (homework); you learn it at home, and then use it in the classroom (lab). I would be willing to try that.
The BEST teaching technique ... for you, for abstract ideas.
The best way to learn depends on the topic. There is a vast difference in reading how to do something and actually doing it. Both are needed, but there is so much material for medical doctors so learn that they couldn't possibly know everything that needs to be covered using the method described.
There simply isn't time.
Imagine you have 6 classes, meeting 3 times a week, for 90 minutes, each covering a chapter per lecture. Even with "active learning", only specific portions of the material can be experienced. That doesn't mean the other parts, not covered, don't need to be learned too, just from the reading.
BTW, I agree with your method of learning, but fortunately, seeing the material 2 ways was sufficient for me to pass the tests and have a deep enough understanding.
Reading the material BEFORE the lectures, then following along DURING the lecture to solidify the new knowledge AND asking questions worked for me. For process/task oriented learning, working all the exercises/problems for each chapter and taking whatever notes about those solutions (mainly formulas) onto a 1 pg/chapter summary worked. Tests would usually cover 4 chapters, so I'd consolidate 4 pgs into 1, grouping similar ideas, to make the connections.
Now I lecture at a local University. On the first day, I tell the new students the tricks I've learned about learning like it is a huge secret and cheating. I whisper it. Students are in my lectures for all different reasons. Sometimes they don't have a choice. Sometimes they want to make a career in the subject AND have tremendous aptitude. Those with aptitude find the material simple to learn.
How is this different than the Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach pioneered at McMaster medical school in the 60s (and since adopted worldwide)?
As students at Mac, we often got a kick out of seeing even our fiercest crtics at schools like the University of Toronto slowly come around to our pedagogy, but with subtly different names of course (ie, case-based learning).
It works great for medical school, and I think would also apply well to graduate school, where you have pressure to obtain results or not embarass yourself on the wards to drive your learning -- often jokingly called "Shame-based learning" in medicine. On the other hand, the students that I met that used PBL during their undergrad often had frighteningly large gaps in their knowledge if they weren't interested in a particular topic. And PBL is not at all suited to giving grades out, which is not a problem at med school which are almost exclusively pass-fail, but does not help you sort the wheat from the chaff at an undergrad level.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Lectures are good for rote memorization, but the only class that really requires rote memorization is anatomy. Everything else is better taught in problem-based learning system. Medicine is problem-solving anyways.
This is not unlike what I've experienced through the Open University here in the UK. For those who don't know, OU is a regular public university, where all undergraduate courses are run in external model.
One thing that distinguishes Open University, is their active research into new teaching methods. While they _used_ to do lectures, they don't appear to do that any more, and with more modern methods, they're considered world leaders in research into how to teach effectively.
When I was a kid, we'd see lectures screen in the wee hours of the morning on the TV, and students would have to have a VCR and record the lectures for later viewing. That, and textbooks was the primary means of studying.
Nowadays, they have an e-learning website with hypermedia text, with embedded videos, exercises and quizzes. It can be tough and annoying to not have video lectures if you're not used to it, but OTOH, you're forced to engage with the material and it paces you (vital when studying externally), so it seems to work.
by applying effort
See, that's the problem: effort. That's too much work. Let's rather drag the ones willing to do it down with the lazy. After all, meritocracy is evil and everyone is entitled to an A.
It's like educational communism: everyone gets by on the backs of those few who are willing to put in the effort.
If you do all the work, you do all of the learning. The slacker typically learn nothing and a good grade is not going to change that fact.
Without lectures, how will I get any sleep? All the rest of the time is taken up with important activities.
Abandoning lectures is stupid.
Lectures aren't to "teach" you how to do something, they are to explain what it is you are about to learn, provide the context, provide a process map to that learning.
The ACTUAL learning is done by you, at your desk, alone or with a group of people. and even then the actual learning comes right down to YOU performing the task, not just hanging out with others who are performing the task.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there.
So in other words, they have no solution to accelerate the initial process of learning the material, so they just shovel that responsibility entirely onto the student.
Not that active learning is bad, but you'd think if you are "replacing lectures" you'd actually replace them with something, not just skip to the lab/homework.
If I had mod points, I'd definitely give you some. Most classes of this sort, in my experience, have both a lecture and a lab. You learn the concepts in the lecture, and you apply them in the lab. If you switch to nothing but labs and require students to study the topics in advance, you've now isolated the students and taken them out of the environment where they can ask questions on things they don't understand, and hear other students' questions on things they didn't consider.
Labs are great, but lectures are just as important.
It seems to be pretty much what a high school teacher will do. Teach a bit, do some exercises, etc.
Obviously at a certain level this is a waste of valuable professor time, but is a professor's time really that valuable if they're spending most of the lecture regurgitating the content that's already in the textbook used in hundreds of universities?
Nonsense, diversity does not benefit anyone. And ther are no any different learning styles etc. It's all bs.
Learning styles are BS, in the sense of "visual learner", "auditory learner", "kinaesthetic learner". But if you look at the faculty in any given university, you'll find a lot of personality traits that appear to be high-functioning autistic spectrum. The whole system of universities is a self-selecting system, where only the people who are comfortable with the teaching style go on to make a career in it. And so it continues.
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with ASD -- quite the opposite. We've come a long way as a society thanks to the minority who genuinely think different, in a neurological sense. Just that we need to expand our horizons and get better at teaching neurotypical people too.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
They still end up with the same credentials. And if they're a good enough bullshit artist, they can even do better in a job interview than me. Very few universities actually require someone to take a final competency test before awarding a degree. And very few companies test a potential employee's actual knowledge before hiring. So a slacker waltzes through to a degree on other people's work, and into a job based on credentials he or she didn't earn.
It's bullshit any way you cut it. Good students shouldn't have to carry the lazy dumbasses. It's just a way for schools to cover up their weak students.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I am surely not. But I have too much of university experience in three or four countries you only dream to travel to after your retirement.
Nothing wrong with having universities stuffed with university people. They like to work for tiny salaries in exchange for the tiny remainders of their academic freedom. Business types and working types will not like it there.
I am surely not. But I have too much of university experience in three or four countries you only dream to travel to after your retirement.
Your assumptions about me are as incorrect as your previous post.
If learning is the students responsibility, then why have we always taught - - - from Neolith stone hand-tool makers to constructing Greens functions ?
Teaching hugely speeds up learning by directing students to what they need to learn and helping them learn it when they cannot understand or misunderstand a concept. You do realise that teaching is not the same thing as learning, right? Teaching is designed to aid learning, not replace it especially since you cannot teach something before you have learnt it.
...yes, a hundred times yes. "Active learning" where "you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there" is always better than a lecture -- where the student comes in knowing nothing and leaves knowing more than nothing.
Good on you. If the student has already learned it, they'll learn more. Congrats.
I believe "active learning" used to be called "home work". I guess George Carlin's right again -- shell shock, battle fatigue, and operational exhaustion, ain't got nothing on post-traumatic stress disorder.