What is the add-value of lectures?

Information is everywhere, and information that students need to learn is available to them in a huge variety of formats and sources. A crucial role for modern-day teachers is to curate the available resources and direct students towards the most suitable and usable sources for the information that they need. We can curate the sufficiency for what our students need to carry out their learning tasks, and to achieve the learning outcomes for the topic or module they are studying. Or we can train our students to seek out the information themselves and evaluate its quality and value.

So, in this context, what is the purpose of a lecture? If students have constant access to rich resources on pretty much every subject we would want to teach, why should we spend time talking to them about that subject, rather than letting them investigate for themselves?

What is the add-value of lectures?

The bottom line is, what can your lecture do that the students can’t do for themselves? How can your lecture better inform your students than what is available to them in other sources? How can your lecture improve the students understanding, skills or practices in ways that they couldn’t achieve through their own research and practice? And in this, let’s now work from the assumption that our students won’t do the work for themselves. A real danger in teaching is to make the assumption that our students are too lazy to do the reading, research and practice for themselves; this leads to a lowest-common denominator approach of always teaching the basics. Too often, teachers feel that they have to re-explain what is already in the students’ textbooks, rather than thinking of ways to add value.

Lectures that Add Value

When planning lectures, it’s important to think of ways in which you can add value to the resources that students have available to them.

The ‘ah-ha’ moment

Is there a particular subject, perhaps a really knotty problem or difficult to grasp concept, that you know you can explain clearly – perhaps you know you can explain it in a way that leads to that real penny-drop moment, the ‘ah-hah’ that helps the students get it and move on?

Exemplifying

Can you provide examples that add to and expand on what is in the available resources and will help your students get a deeper understanding?

Storytelling

Do you have anecdotes from your professional life that you can use to contextualised what has been learned, show it in a real and meaningful context, and allow you to add a little storytelling that helps to capture your students interest?

Problem-solving

Could you start with the problems your students are facing and the questions they can’t answer? You might ask for problems in advance or use examples from your previous teaching. In this way, you can use the concepts and theories being studied as part of a solution finding exercise that helps students see application rather than just understanding.

Make Lectures Micro

In face-to-face teaching environments, research has shown that the average student’s attention span is around 10 to 15 minutes. In online courses, there is evidence that students stop paying attention to teaching videos after about 6 minutes.  In both contexts, it is clear that lecturing should be provided in short bursts, or as ‘micro-lectures’.

When using micro-lectures, you then have the opportunity to intersperse your teaching with learning activities that will help your students to assimilate the information presented. The massive add-value of the lecture here is that it provides focus, ensures the students are clear on what information they should be using, and gives the opportunity for them to apply, solve problems, answer questions, collaborate and demonstrate understanding, leading to further questions, further clarification and greater depth in their knowledge and application of the target theories, models, practices, etc.

Work from the add-value

If, as described above, your lectures have add-value, such as providing models, examples or solutions, the activities you invite your students to carry out can lead directly from these – further problems to solve, or discussions around other examples of application in the students’ own experience.

Micro-lectures in live classes

If you lecture in short bursts, you can then invite your students to collaborate with others sitting near them – even in tiered lecture theatres, students can talk to those immediately beside, in front or behind them. Your micro-lecture can be the trigger for collaboration, and the collaboration can lead to questions and uncertainties that you can then respond to when you re-focus the room. This same pattern can be followed using break-out rooms in online live classrooms.

Micro-lectures in asynchronous teaching

The recorded micro-lectures that you place in the VLE/LMS pages for your asynchronous online classes can have really powerful impact. Where you link your students directly to the e-text of their core reading, into library resources or out to industry weblinks, etc., you can place your short lecture where you help your students gain deeper insight. And just as in a classroom, you can use micro-lectures as a trigger for asynchronous student discussion and collaboration. Great advantages of recorded micro-lectures are that the students can return to them as often as they need, and that you can provide subtitles and transcripts to improve accessibility for all of your students.

References

Cooper AZ, Richards JB. (2017) Lectures for Adult Learners: Breaking Old Habits in Graduate Medical Education. Am J Med. 2017 Mar;130(3):376-381. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2016.11.009. Epub 2016 Nov 28. PMID: 27908794.

Guo, P. J., J. Kim, and R. Rubin. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. Paper presented at L@S 2014, March 4–5, 2014, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

 Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay