In defence of the lecture: the value of shared time and space

If your lecture was available to watch in the comfort of your bedroom, would you bother going to lectures?

This is one of the key questions addressed by Karoline Nanfeldt , an intern at the University of Edinburgh this summer.

An empty lecture theatre - the future?

 The question was prompted as Edinburgh are currently involved in the rollout of lecture recording/lecture capture systems across the university involving at least 400 teaching rooms. In conjunction with this a number of research projects (one of which I will be involved with next year) have been funded. These seek to answer a range of questions from ‘how often and for how long do students watch the videos?’ to ‘what effect does the availability of lecture recordings have on students’ approaches to studying?’

In light of this there have been discussions about what lecture recordings are for and, consequently, the value of lectures. One Harvard computer science professor recently wrote about his experience of substituting lectures with videos of lectures. For one year David J. Malan, gave students access to online videos of his lectures and told them that they only needed to attend the first and last of the semester. But this year he has reversed that decision. The reason? Students felt ‘something was missing, not just the students themselves but the energy of an audience’.

Let’s leave aside here the argument that in a ‘true’ flipped class he would have been using the lecture time for more ‘active learning’ - problems solving, discussions etc.  

What is it about being in the lecture that the students felt was missing?  I would argue that two things are lacking in recorded lectures: a shared time and a shared space *.

My colleague in digital education, James Lamb has interviewed history students about their uses of technology. He also that students (and tutors) feel that being in the lecture in person is a different, more valuable experience than watching a recording of it.

This sense of being in the same place is important, and means that lecture recordings are not likely to replace physical lectures any time soon. But this feeling can be enhanced if lectures involve interactive engagement or active learning pedagogies.

In my own research, I’ve interviewed first year physics students about their experiences of lectures. These lectures involve the use of TopHat (clickers) and Peer Instruction which means students spend around 50% of the lecture time involved in solving problems and discussing problems with each other.  The lectures are ‘captured’ and made available for students to watch shortly after the lectures takes place, but in this case watching a recorded version of the lecture is a very different experience to being there, thinking about and discussing problems together with other students.

Many of the students I interviewed commented that the lectures can be a good way to meet people. Given that student dropout rates at University are linked to a lack of socialisation, the shared time/shared space of a lecture can have an important role in promoting social interactions with peers. This applies to traditionally taught lectures too, but the requirement to discuss with others was specifically mentioned by a number of students as being an ice-breaker, enabling them to get into conversations with new people.

‘it’s a great way to meet those people. And as it turns out those are the people I work with on my, when I get stuck on physics problems like for a workshop or something like that [Student K]’.

Students also talked about the way that interactions between students and lecturer create a sense of community, of shared enquiry, in which they felt able to make their voice heard.

               

'When the lecturer asks us questions, when someone answers, it makes me feel more comfortable to ask questions and stop the lecturer. I think when the lecturer engages with the audience, it feels more inclusive and that it is acceptable and not awkward to ask questions. It's hard to explain but sometimes questions seem too stupid so I don't ask but when the audience is engaged with the lecturer, there is a sense of community that everyone is understanding and there are more people who would want you to ask those questions [Student I].'

My findings (in agreement with James') show that students value the interpersonal connections that the shared space and time created by a live lecture can provide. For this reason it seems unlikely that we will see the ‘death of the lecture’ as some have predicted. But the rollout of lecture recording systems also gives us the opportunity to take a deeper look at what we actually use this shared space and time for. Foremost amongst these (for me) is: What additional value can we add to the live lectures that will enhance students’ learning and their experience of higher education? As the lecture recording systems are put into action in the coming weeks it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, they have on teaching approaches in lectures.

*  A shared space need not be a physical space. When studying on the MSc in Digital Education tutorials in Second Life created a similar experience. 

Image: “Lecture Lecture”by Alan Levineon Flikr is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In defence of the lecture: the value of shared time and space by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.