12 ms·

Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too

• doktrin 12y ago
  While substantive data is always nice, this has always struck me as a bit of a "duh" factor. Lectures are omnipresent because they're cost effective. Pedagogical effectiveness is an afterthought. Anecdotal : Honestly, I'd go so far as to say that teaching as a whole is an afterthought, even (or especially?) at top universities. I work for a research institution affiliated with a top CS school, and attend their classes regularly. The quality of instruction and academic support in the undergrad classes makes me cringe for the students, particularly given the astronomical tuitions demanded of them. Over-crowded (and un-recorded) lectures are a staple.
  • praseodym 12y ago
    You're completely right about teaching being an afterthought: just look at a university's hiring policy. New staff (researchers) are hired because of their research skills, i.e. the number of publications they can deliver or the number of grants they can receive, certainly not because of their teaching skills. Good teaching skills are only considered a nice benefit.
    • privong 12y ago
      To be fair, this is often less true for colleges, where there's a stronger emphasis on teaching.
      • Fomite 12y ago
        Or any university hiring lecturers.
    • zacinbusiness 12y ago
      My wife, a university professor, was hired only after three extensive teaching demonstrations. I think some universities and departments focus in research while others focus on academics.
  • ericHosick 12y ago
    There are very scalable ways to lecture (enable learning) such as student centered learning (called active learning in the post). These are both cost effective and result in better learning outcomes. Lectures are omnipresent for many reasons. One is because it is a lot easier to stand up in front of the class and just spew out knowledge than to take the time to understand what the students need in a class and adjust lectures appropriately.
    • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      At the grad level, you get closer to what the professor is actually researching, and they have a better handle on it. Getting a professor to empathize with a 1st year undergraduate is much harder than getting them to empathize with a 1st year grad student.
  • sharkweek 12y ago
    Little freshman sharkweek back in '03, having gone to a small high school (graduating class of ~70 or so) walks into his first class at the University of Washington, Economics 201 (the first of the series). The class is 700 people, in Kane Hall, literally 10x my entire graduating class from HS. After the first lecture, and with extreme naivety, I walk up to the professor, Eugene Silberberg, and ask him when his office hours are in case I need any help with the material. The perplexed look on his face was probably the most memorable thing I experienced my entire four years in college. "Uh, go talk to your TA"
    • dublinben 12y ago
      It's pretty easy to avoid the enormous introductory level lecture classes. Nearly every large university will grant credit for AP or CLEP exams towards undergraduate level classes like Econ 201. These exams cost under $100 for an entire course. You can also find many schools offering these courses online, for a bit more money. Transferring in a credit is painless.
      • valarauca1 12y ago
        > Transferring in a credit is painless. Actually transferring college credits is one of the most painful things I've done in my academic career.
        • deleted 12y ago
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        • Loughla 12y ago
          How long ago did you attend? Almost all states have made public colleges and universities arrange transfer agreements to guarantee credits will transfer. Most private, not-for-profits have taken up this cause as well. For-profits are still a bit wonky with transferring, because their academic rigor tends to be terrible. Now, out of state transfers, that's another story.
  • eatitraw 12y ago
    > they're cost effective Probably not as much as simply reading books. My currrent understanding that they were cost effective at some point of history, when students didn't have books, but lecturers did: > Not only are they still lecturing, a relic of the Middle Ages when students didn’t have books and monks read them to them http://educationoutrage.blogspot.de/2013/01/princeton-professor-teaches-coursera.html http://educationoutrage.blogspot.de/2013/01/princeton-profes...
    • Fomite 12y ago
      I vastly prefer lectures to books.
      • sgeisenh 12y ago
        Agreed. Lectures enforce pacing and accountability better than I ever could on my own.
      • watwut 12y ago
        I prefer book to lectures, but whenever I skipped lecture the learning for exam was much more difficult. I do not really know why. I rarely understood things directly during the lecture, I usually just wrote notes. However, just being there and listening made learning afterwards easier. I usually also got better grade, maybe because I had clearer idea about what lecturer focused on. Video lectures on coursera were much more effective for me then live lectures. The difference was in speed up, slow down, rewind and stop buttons of course.
        • aydinghajar 12y ago
          "maybe because I had clearer idea about what lecturer focused on." Exactly. The book covers a much wider range of topics. The lecture just clues you in on what the teacher is going to include on the exam.
          • grayclhn 12y ago
            That's almost always what the teacher considers the most important material. So, yeah, attending lectures lets you know what concepts are especially important in the subject.
  • kleiba 12y ago
    Here's my counter anecdote: I also work at an institution that can be described like yours. To me, listening to a professor lecturing has always been the most effective way of learning something. Not because the lecturing quality was so outstanding but because I apparently can absorb new information better when somebody explains it while I think along. I fall asleep much quicker when I read a text book (as opposed to a lot of other students).
    • bm1362 12y ago
      Throwing myself behind your anecdote. Works for me, I remain engaged with a lecturer. Different strokes.
    • aurumpotest 12y ago
      I too learn effectively when I've got outstanding lecturers lecturing at me. However that's rarely the case - some lecturers don't really care for the students; some care but aren't that great at lecturing... So in practice, lectures don't even always work for students who learn effectively from lectures.
  • Spooky23 12y ago
    Alot of that is a filter placed there deliberately. CSI 201 was a class with 2 500+ lecture sections and something like 30 lab sections. The graduating group for Computer Science had about 75 students. 201 weeded out the fratboys and folks who used "sort by first job starting salary" approach to picking a major. The 300 level courses washed out the people who weren't passionate/insane, and the 400 level courses taught you stuff.
    • thecage411 12y ago
      I still remember the shock I had upon taking my first few graduate-level classes. The lectures and assignments were actually focused on the material rather than weeding people out through large, poorly specified projects / problem sets.
  • gcd 12y ago
    I'm about to graduate from Berkeley, a so-called 'top' school. Besides the name of the degree, I can't think of anything that was particular top-notch about my education here. Class sizes were big and are only getting bigger. The intro CS class had a few hundred when I took it. Now? It can have up to 1100 students. I would say I've only had 4 good or great professors (enthusiastic, interesting, smart but also good at teaching) my whole time here - one in CS, one in EE, the other two in humanities. Everyone else ranged from useless or unbearable to okay. Many were simply too smart, so to speak. In other classes, the lecture powerpoints did most of the work for them. In fact, most of my learning took place while taking notes independently on lecture notes / slides (rarely the textbook, although sometimes they were okay), sometimes watching lectures from other schools, and then trying to apply the knowledge to projects and practicing for exams. Discussion sections were only occasionally useful, generally for the more difficult classes where I actually needed an empathetic person who recently took the course to explain things to I. For the most part, though, I feel like I taught myself most of what I learned here - I would have done fine if lectures didn't exist. Mind you, this only applies to the CS program. I took only the required EE courses. The great thing about the institution is definitely the research. My graphics professor, for example, does a ton of awesome work both academically and professionally. Working with him would have been a great opportunity to get into that industry. Otherwise, I don't see why I couldn't have just done my education by myself. The only problem would be motivation to slug through the difficult / boring but important stuff. My databases class got quite boring at points such that, if I were teaching myself, I may have just skipped over a good chunk of the class material. I'm imagining that if I just had a person to get on my case and me on them, it would be almost as effective as the concept of a GPA.
    • grayclhn 12y ago
      That's too bad. Two of the best classes I've taken in my life were at Berkeley -- econ 141 (econometrics, about 80 students) and math 195 (undergraduate stochastic differential equations, about 5-10 students, 3 I think taking for a grade. If I'm off on the course number, sorry.) This was over a decade ago, though. Two thoughts, 1: you've been screwed by the California budget over the last 5-10 years. 2: I don't know what the most advanced classes were in your field, but Berkeley (and other top top schools) offers classes that are unimaginable at other universities. An undergraduate SDE class really is "unimaginable" most places, and learning the material from a textbook would be impossible -- it's too difficult and appropriate textbooks don't exist. The "textbook" is usually the instructor's notes from the last time they taught the class. Anyway, I have enormous fondness for Berkeley and the three classes I took there got me into grad school and kicked off my career (I took these classes after graduating from college --- Tufts, which is a great liberal arts-oriented school with generally small classes and personal attention, but it ain't got undergraduate SDE --- and moving to the bay area), so I'm kind of saddened to read your experience. edit: typos
• joeevans1000 12y ago
  Well, scientists and computer engineers are typically working on real world problems, for which certain learning styles are better. I'm an engineer, so I actually would agree with this article... for those domains. For other areas, like theoretical physics and philosophy, however, the lecture and the seminar are awesome. So we need to be careful not to paint the world with an engineering brush.
  • tekalon 12y ago
    Even for the areas where you think they work, they should be more conversation based rather than the one way learning of lecture.
  • mikevm 12y ago
    I agree. I think that in Computer Science in particular you can completely move to video recorded lectures. Some say that we need live lectures so that people could ask questions, but from my experience, the questions asked during lectures are usually inane (mostly stemming from the fact that the person didn't pay attention) and could be answered by simply rewinding the video, or looking something up online. At the worst case, you could always email the professor/TA. I guess the only thing being lost here is the social aspect of college where you get to meet new people.
  • lutorm 12y ago
    Having studied theoretical physics, I would disagree with the statement that lectures are awesome. If anything, learning theoretical physics requires grappling with conceptually difficult material, where problem solving and debating the subject are essential. You can't learn it by passively memorizing information. It's conceptually simple, "orientation-like" material that can be learned fairly effectively with lectures.
• stonogo 12y ago
  This applies perfectly to every TED talk.
• findjashua 12y ago
  Personally, I think the Khan academy model is the future - watch lecture videos at home, and work through problems in the classroom.
  • davycro 12y ago
    Agreed. But the video has to be quality. We have several flipped classrooms at my school, where you watch a video before lecture and then have an interactive session. The videos are mostly a professor talking over a PowerPoint deck, which is worse than a lecture.
    • findjashua 12y ago
      Powerpoints or copying equations on the blackboard are the best way to make sure students don't attend lectures/doze off in class.
  • ghshephard 12y ago
    As one who has gone through about 100+ Khan videos, I appreciate them for what they are - which is usually helping someone over a conceptual hurdle. I would love it if someone were to take the next step, and create a more sophisticated question bank than Khan has, which stresses your learning experience. The one key issue with Khan is that it typically doesn't stress you, and as such, the knowledge retained is usually fairly shallow.
    • nooron 12y ago
      StudyEdge (YC S13) is doing a great job with a similar service. They provide Khan Academy-style videos with a live support system (on the FB app platform). The videos + support system are meant to supplement university courses-- essentially acting as a web tutor. Their own supplementary question banks tend to be deep and well designed. I used the service to get through Calc 2 as an undergrad. I liked it so much (went from a C+ to A student in math) that I went to work there the next summer!
      • 12y ago
• JamesArgo 12y ago
  I find it helpful (in a Zen-like way) to remind myself that civilization is a massive patchwork of hacks.
  • tomsthumb 12y ago
    The result of thousands of years of meeting the local maxima.
• skizm 12y ago
  Small point about the title: just because B is more effective than A doesn't mean A is ineffective. Also, I didn't read the original source, but I wonder how difficult it is to get a class to be active participants in a lecture. I know plenty of people, if given a clicker to answer questions in class, would either not do it, or just click randomly (if it was required). I think it is pretty obvious that getting students to actively participate is the ideal, but I feel like a lot of teachers and/or professors have given up on this strategy because it is more work on their part. If students don't want to learn (a good amount of) teachers probably don't want to put forth the effort to force them to.
  • Fomite 12y ago
    I don't know a single faculty member who has positive things to say about clickers, even those who were optimistic.
    • nwhitehead 12y ago
      I'm a lecturer and I think clickers are great, for large classes especially. Clicker questions and small group discussion about the answers gets students thinking rather than just sitting there with eyes glazing over. It works well. By giving a small amount of real credit to the answers you even get all the slackers discussing the topic and arguing about which answer is right. Technologically clickers are impressively easy to use as well, you just need to put in slides with questions into the main presentation. The biggest disadvantage is students who forget to bring their clicker or have endless excuses about why they couldn't be in class on a certain day.
      • watwut 12y ago
        They seem unfair to me :). I learned most afterwards when I was sitting in room alone and really learning. I was present at lectures wrote notes and all that, but found it hard/uncomfortable to absorb it immediately or form an opinion. I prefer to have time to think about material before being questioned on it. My grades were good, so I do not think it is the issue of me being incapable of college level of learning. I also usually managed to get enough participation points or answers or whatever was necessary for the grade, but rarely felt that the whole thing added something to my learning. It felt more like waste of time, especially those parts when people asked or had comments only to show they are participating.
• temuze 12y ago
  Yes! Amen, brother! Two years ago, Sal Khan and John Hennessy (president of Stanford), went to a conference and talked about the future of education: http://allthingsd.com/20120531/how-do-credentials-change-as-education-goes-online-stanford-and-khan-academy-respond-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/how-do-credentials-change-as-... They both concluded that lectures may not exist in the future! Sure, there are such things as lectures that have oratorical brilliance, that inspire students about their subject. However, for the most part, lectures are just inefficient ways to get information across. With the Internet, we have methods to get this information asynchronously, without requiring packing everyone into a room. Rather, the role of the teacher in the future will be supporting students. That's where humans outshine computers - answering questions, tutoring, understanding where students might be confused, etc.
  • lutorm 12y ago
    It's not like Sal Khan was the first to say lectures are an ineffective way of learning. For example the "How people learn" report by the National Academies from 2000 (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853 http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853) is a very good overview for those new to the subject.
  • rimantas 12y ago
    I am pretty sure lectures will exist well after Sal and John will not. It is so sad to see so many people failing to grasp what teaching is.
    • temuze 12y ago
      Passive aggressiveness aside, what would you define teaching as? Me, I learned more from a textbook than I did in big 200 person lectures. You can go at your own pace, you don't have to wait for the professor to answer questions, etc. The best supplement, when I was confused with the material in class, was to have one-on-one time with a teacher.
  • VLM 12y ago
    "lectures may not exist in the future" What would I listen to in my car streamed by bluetooth from my phone? Radio? No way. What might happen is someday, someone is going to record "The Ultimate verbal explanation of a PDA automata" or whatever, and then for the next 500 years that'll be The One that everyone listens to. It hasn't turned out this way in books because of legacy analog media combined with desire of publishers to maximize profits. Imagine if you could just download the Feynman lectures on physics. Aspects are out of date, but still going to be better than the local talent.
• ufmace 12y ago
  Very interesting because, for me personally, the further ahead I've gotten in my career, the more I've realized that I really don't like lectures at all. It's exceptionally rare for me to learn anything or even remember anything from a lecture. Everything I've ever really learned has been from hands-on work, with a book or online reference available. Perhaps some other people learn from lectures, but I don't.
• regoldste 12y ago
  As someone who learns almost exclusively by reading, I've always been bemused by the concept of lectures. I've never thought that a professor explained the material better than the textbook or other reading materials that prepared us for class. To the extent that a professor is expounding on the reading materials--which is what you are really paying for in college--by applying them or synthesizing them, I think those lessons are often better taught through interactive dialogues with students. I'm probably a bit biased from my experience in law school, but I think the socratic method is a particularly strong pedagogical technique, and could be effectively implemented in many undergraduate courses.
  • Fomite 12y ago
    As someone who learns far better by lecture, I've always been bemused by the concept of textbooks. I've never thought that the several hundred dollars I paid for a book got me nearly as far into a subject as listening to the professor.
    • regoldste 12y ago
      I envy you for being so well-adapted to the traditional style of teaching :) On the whole, most people learn better by listening or interacting or doing. I'm certainly the exception in this respect. My brain processes information much differently. It takes me 3x longer to process a sentence read aloud as it would to just read it. Lectures felt like a huge waste of time. But do you really think that a lecture can cover material as thoroughly as a textbook? In my experience, lectures were supposed to cover part of the material (perhaps some of the trickier parts), but could never be treated as a substitute for reading.
      • Fomite 12y ago
        Well, at this point in my career, the lecture covers things not yet written in textbooks ;) But generally speaking, especially when you account for the probability that "read the textbook" will result in me either grinding to a halt or just having content slide off, I covered more in lecture. Textbooks were useful for specific needs for depth, used much more like reference works than a way to learn an entire topic.
• wil421 12y ago
  I can specifically remember dropping a Pysch elective I was required to take simply because the teachers format was horrible. One midterm one final, lectures everyday taken straight from the powerpoints the publisher provided with the teaching edition, same with the tests. I'm sorry but talking isnt teaching I can read the book word for word at home, explain the concepts do some activities anything please! Most classes I got A's in and learned something had hands on activities in addition to the lecture.
• Valseuss 12y ago
  I disagree. In my experience, the lectures are one of the primary reasons for attending a university. For a lecture to be effective, the students will need to have read the material that the lecture is taking on. Then, during the lecture, they should see why they have read what they have and understand why it is important, what the general implications are and so on. For me, at least, a good lecture always brings together the assigned reading material in a way that I cannot achieve alone. A good lecture makes things click. Solving a thousand problems may also make concepts click, but a good lecturer will reduce the time needed. TL;DR: The point of a lecture is not to tell you everything, but to bring together the material that you have already consumed and provide a different perspective than the book you read.
  • crpatino 12y ago
    Yes, you are very right that it is what's supposed to be. The problem is that most students don't want to read ahead and expect the teacher to provide all material in class (and more recently, I am told, to provide class notes for those unable to pay attention for more than 150 seconds in a row). Then, teachers will plan to pander to that majority, so any student who does what s?he is actually supposed to do will end up bored to tears with the so called "lecture". As a single data point, I was well known in undergrad school to sleep through lectures, and be left alone because whenever woke up I ended up disrupting the class plan by asking questions (which I had read about the night before) that other students could hardly understand and care about even less. Then, I suffered a lot through graduate school to get rid of my bad habits once I was expected to attend to real lectures.
• dramirez 12y ago
  I worked at one of the bigger MOOCs for a while and we knew that over 50% of our paying customers never watched any of the video lectures they subscribed to. That's the huge flaw in MOOCs as they are now. You can put all the content in the world online for free or not and most people won't watch or learn from it. That's the critical flaw in the e-learning investments right now.
  • VLM 12y ago
    That's the problem, transplanting physical world directly into somewhere that analogies don't work. Here's a title, and maybe a paragraph about a class. Oh you signed up, nice. Then student found out the details of a 100+ hour investment and said "nope".
  • watwut 12y ago
    Plenty of students skip physical lectures.
  • pyoung 12y ago
    Is that really a flaw? If I can learn better by reading books and then working through problem sets, why bother with the lectures, especially if I am strapped for time as many MOOC participants probably are. I am a huge fan of MOOC's, I've probably attempted about a dozen and have completed about half. So far the biggest reason for failing to complete a class has been time constraints. If I am already familiar with the material (i.e taking the class as a refresher) or don't find the lectures particularly engaging, I will still 'watch' the lectures, but play them in the background while I work on problem sets or do other stuff. In my experience, most MOOCs have a healthy portion of participants who are very familiar with the material, so it's quite possible a good percentage of them are just using the problem sets as a way to refresh their understanding. Unless of course, you are insinuating that a majority of these people are cheating (i.e. copying and pasting answers on HW's) I don't really see what the big deal is.
  • neves 12y ago
    Hey, in some of the classes in my university more than 50% of the students didn't watch the lectures. It is impressive that 50% watched the videos. He glass is half full!
• pnathan 12y ago
  A good lecture has elements neither book, nor video, nor homework, nor group discussion will have. It has the element of a knowledgable person disseminating knowledge in a quasi- Q&A format guided by his knowledge and experience.
• mcphilip 12y ago
  I only found lectures especially useless after the shift to PowerPoint slide dumps. I still think back fondly on the days where English/History/Calculus/etc professors would write on the chalkboard while lecturing. Something about the act of writing made each point seem more important and easier to recall
  • sliverstorm 12y ago
    My favorites were the fusion between the two, (powerpoints for key formulas, scribbling for explaining) especially with the professors that would mark-up the powerpoint with a stylus and post them online.
• bananas 12y ago
  Agree. I didn't go to a single lecture after 2 months at university (electrical engineering). My TA was shit as well - was too tied up in computer vision research and found us inconvenient. However we formed a club (5 of us who actually gave a shit) to work through stuff as students. Rather awesomely our digital electronics lecturer turned up after a couple of weeks and helped us with stuff and had a weekly rant about how useless the other staff were. I think we helped him vent too.
• chris_va 12y ago
  From the original paper: "The effect sizes indicate that on average, student performance on examinations and concept inventories increased by 0.47 SDs under active learning (n = 158 studies), and that the odds ratio for failing was 1.95 under traditional lecturing (n = 67 studies)." Averages are not a very comprehensive measure for efficacy in a teaching environment. I am glad they included the failure rates too, but people here should not be so quick to jump to changing out the entire methodology based on two numbers. Different students learn differently, and ideally you would look at the distribution in student performance for different balances of teaching methods. Having said that, they are onto something.
• ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  Here's an article from 1981 lamenting that although the science was settled and everyone agreed that lectures weren't any more effective than unstructured reading, you couldn't get the people giving lectures to stop doing so, generally for rather insipid reasons: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/20reasons.html https://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/20reasons... "Disclaimer: The ideas, explanations and evidence which form the arguments of this paper are not the outcome of years of esoteric study and hence accessible only to professional educationalists. On the contrary, they are readily available in popular paperbacks, notably in Donald Bligh's "What's the Use of Lectures?" The evidence is not new. The arguments have been made before. Only the continued prevalence of lecturing justifies the writing of this paper." [...] "Conclusion: I would not like to leave the impression that I feel that there is no justification for ever lecturing. I lecture myself (though seldom for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch and then seldom when written substitutes are available). I believe there are circumstances when a well structured, well paced, varied, lively lecture can be the most efficient teaching method. But I do believe there is far more lecturing going on than can reasonably be justified by the evidence concerning the efficiency of lectures, especially bearing in mind the nature of the educational goals we claim to be striving for. I believe this state of affairs to be largely due to ignorance, attitudes, and institutional constraints, rather than to any inherent virtues of lecturing which I have overlooked, and which everyone else is privy to. I believe both institutions and validating bodies ought to be asking serious questions about courses which appear to be based primarily on lecturing as the dominant teaching method."
• grownseed 12y ago
  Back when I was at University, a lot of the lectures (and more generally courses) felt like advertising platforms for the lecturers. We would follow bland Powerpoint slides which would regularly point to particular chapters of books, more often than not written by the lecturers themselves. The slides would often be years old and would fail to adapt to common trends. As for the books, the few updates they received each year seemed to be a way for lecturers to force students to buy the new editions (e.g. page 10 becomes page 20), rather than actual research updates. This, to me, just feels like lecturers trying to get their money's worth. The students have become secondary to the whole "education thing". I'm aware that higher education systems are largely at fault, not just the lecturers, but one would think integrity would have gotten the better of this odd machinery. Unfortunately the problem seems even larger to me, we assume Education is this linear, step-by-step thing, when in fact people learn different things at different speeds, in very different ways. Lectures are only a symptom of trying (and failing miserably) to normalize Education. It's the quote by Einstein in all its glory: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid".
  • Jormundir 12y ago
    I'm actually very optimistic for education in the near future. After taking some Coursera classes, I'm confident a more personalized education is completely attainable. There are a lot of weaknesses to point at with the online education platforms popping up, but I think those weaknesses minuscule compared to our standardized brick and mortar structure we have today. Really the only thing I find particularly lacking is a mentor. I don't need a person to lecture me in person everyday for an hour, I just need someone to check in to make sure I'm staying on track, or to point out a different area I might find interesting if I'm bored with what I'm working on. We really only need a few expert lecturers to build high quality online classes. The 40 students to one teacher can be slightly modified by 40 students to one mentor, whose job is simply to make sure everyone is staying relatively engaged. I don't think a teacher can effectively instruct a class of 40 students, and it's wildly ineffective and inefficient. A trained mentor, however, can make sure a group of 40 students are progressing on their own. (The 1:40 certainly needs to be up for experimentation, but the point is I feel online education can be a close fit to the general infrastructure of our system today).
• spodek 12y ago
  I used inquiry-driven project-based learning -- http://joshuaspodek.com/inquiry-driven-project-based-learning-rocks http://joshuaspodek.com/inquiry-driven-project-based-learnin... -- to teach my class at NYU-Poly, "Entrepreneurial Marketing and Sales" this semester. Experiential learning rocks! I never want to go back to lecturing. I had only recently learned of the teaching style, mainly from a K-12 education conference where I was the only university professor, which KQED reported on -- http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/can-university-professors-benefit-from-k-12-progressive-teaching-tactics http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/can-university-profe.... After the conference I redid the syllabus to replace lectures and texts with the students and I getting to understand each other to connect the material to their lives to motivate them and so I could help them create projects they'd care about because they'd be connected to their lives. The results: - The students loved the class. - Over half of them are continuing the class projects after the course ended. - Several reported me the best professor and the class the best class they took. - The students are getting together to create a video about the class even after it ended. As much as I'd like to brag, the credit goes to the teaching style. Engaging students with empathy and helping direct them to personal projects connected to their lives works better than any lecture, at least in my experience. It was a lot more engaging, fun, and educational for me too. The core, to me, is to see the students as the most important consideration and the content lower, the opposite of the lecture model. With the internet, the students can find any information they want at any time. Lecturing wastes their time. My value is in connecting with them, helping direct them, sharing my experience, and holding them accountable -- more like a manager or colleague in the world.
  • sheepmullet 12y ago
    How do you avoid having students stick to what they are familiar and comfortable with? How do you ensure students get a broad understanding of the subject? In my experience the major difference between hiring self directed learners and people who studied cs in college is the lack of breadth in self directed learners. Great python/js/php web dev who has never heard of pointers or a priority queue?
    • spodek 12y ago
• jonsen 12y ago
  “Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,” But the way professors are compensated has changed dramatically. In the early times the students payed the professor directly. Per lecture. I.e. those students who chose to attend and apparently got something of value.
• Morgawr 12y ago
  I think one important point to make is not only about the amount of knowledge absorbed from lectures, but also the discipline and rigor in education. A lot of comments seem to hail e-learning, remote videos, recorded lectures, etc etc as the future of education, and it scares me if I have to be honest. There is a very important difference between a self-taught student and one that has undergone through formal education, and that is scientific rigor. Not to say that a self-learned person is less knowledgeable or "worse", it's obviously not true and there are always extremes, however actually attending lectures, going through the daily (and sometimes boring) routine of grinding through contents as explained in a boring way by your lecturer.. it's all part of building your determination and character as a researcher. More often than not I find self-taught people staying at a very shallow level of knowledge, broad and generic, never digging through the details, going that extra mile to properly master a subject in a structured and well-disciplined matter. In my opinion, that kind of education can only be achieved in a mentor-student relationship and, especially, through formal lectures. Even by just being around other people and interacting with the academic environment, it helps abstracting to a higher state of reasoning. PS: I only have experience in the scientific academia, not talking about other branches like arts or philosophy or whatever.
  • grayclhn 12y ago
    I always find it educational to meet someone who lacks all of the characteristics I think are crucial for success, but is still successful. In that vein.... I probably attended fewer than 15% of all of my lectures, for every class in undergrad (I was a math major; attendance didn't magically pick up in my advanced classes either). I've also finished an MS in stats and a PhD in economics (working on econometric theory, so... basically more stats) and work as an assistant professor. Now, I'm posting on HN at 1am instead of sleeping or working, so I certainly lack discipline, but I don't think that "attending boring lectures as an undergraduate" is the magic precondition that you seem to. :)
    • thesimpsons1022 12y ago
      I feel like the problem is that educational effectiveness is too much of a personal thing that it is impossible to argue about. everyone learns differently. I think it's important to note that most people are self driven enough to learn on their own. I learn a lot in lectures. other people go to lecture and goof off and then learn the material on their own later. truth is, the smart kids will usually find a way to succeed no matter how they learn. What we are trying to figure out is the best way to teach the masses. I also think it's important to consider the sheer number of people trying to get an education in modern times as opposed to the past where most students were smart, privileged kids whose parents were probably decently successful.
• jayro 12y ago
  Here are some additional stories on the topic that are worth reading: * Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-lose-the-lecture-as-teaching-tool http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-l... * At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?pagewant... * First-year physics course being transformed through experiment http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/physics-1219.html http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/physics-1219.html * The Tomorrow's College Lecture Series - Don't Lecture Me http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/ http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows... * Inventing a New Kind of College http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/inventing-new-college.html http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows...
• skywhopper 12y ago
  Am I missing where they indicate what they mean by "active learning"? All I see are references to clickers and asking individual students questions during a lecture. Sounds like it's actually just a question of dull lecturing vs engaging lecturing to me. Can anyone provide a summary of what "active learning" means in this context?
• iamthepieman 12y ago
  This can't be a surprise to anyone can it? They can be boring, entertaining, exciting, repetitive, straight-from-the-textbook or enlightening but surely no one thought lectures were primarily educational. Good lecturers made me want to read the book, study the subject, experiment on my own or do my best on assignments and labs. That's the purpose of the lecture in my opinion.
• skierscott 12y ago
  I can't find the journal article, but I saw an academic machine learning paper that claimed our whole lecture system was inefficient and not optimal. Our lectures are currently based off an old system, before all the technology now. The game changed when we introduced computers/phones/tablets, but our method didn't change. Students don't have much to rely on to determine how well they're doing in a class. Currently, we rely on practice problems. Often times, this feedback loop isn't closed. If it is, it's possible to learn where you went wrong, but often times the solution manuals say "as an exercise for the reader..." or have similar lines. This paper was proposing to devise some test to determine how well a student understood the material and suggest strategies to more easily solve the problems (afaik at least). Something I've noticed: we still rely on someone else relaying the information to us. Who says there's who explains the concept better somewhere else? Can we devise a method to have the student give their full and undivided attention while incorporating the technology?
• hajderr 12y ago
  In contrast, the method of pair discussions has been used for a long time in the Islamic Seminars in Najaf and Qom. Which has produced highly effective teachers, each one able to lead a lecture in every subject they take. Maybe someone can highlight the teaching methods in other parts of the Eastern world?