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.

Comments

I worked for a nonprofit that tried promote this.

[hey!]

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.

Learning is ALWAYS the Student's Responsibility

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Mixed bag

[students]

"The medium that best suits a person's ability to learn varies a lot from person to person."

This sounds like it's true, but it is actually highly controversial among learning scientists. There is very good evidence that people have well-established ways they prefer to learn ("learning styles"). The idea that teaching should be customized to match students' learning styles was originally promoted by a company that made money selling learning styles tests to schools. It turns out it is very difficult to prove if it works or not. And it's very expensive to implement.

In educational experiments, alternative teaching methods nearly always work better than lecturing. I'm not aware of any evidence that replacing lectures with a thoughtfully-designed alternative has ever harmed a student's learning. It is common that students complain they have to work more when lectures are gone - but the extra work is the cause of the extra learning.

Re:Mixed bag

[Ol Olsoc]

Administrators are getting bigger and bigger raises and bonuses, while full professors get replaced by adjuncts who make less than the minimum wage. So those lectures with 150 students are given by someone with little experience and who doesn't even get basic benefits like health care or a sick day, while administrators are being given seven figure salaries.

A smaller and smaller percentage of the money in higher education is actually being spent on educating students, but the football coach is the highest-paid public employee in the state.

As cynical as that sounds, it is absolutely correct. Having spent over 30 years in the arena, the takeover of universities by management is nothing short of shocking.

There are now more people shuffling papers around and pulling down 6 figure salaries keeping track of 5 thousand dollars worth of pencils than there are academics.

And if you want to know why college is so much more expensive now, they'll tell you they would have to hire 50 new accountants, 30 middle managers, 2 staff assistants, and have a building built to house them.

Then a year later, they'll release a report saying that the University needs to hire more accountants and managers.

Context Matters

[sycodon]

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.