Five things for professors to consider before banning mobile technology from their lectures
This short and probably pointless contribution to the debate surrounding the use of mobile technology in lecture halls at university was inspired by this tweet from Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia and author of the fabulous Why don’t students like school.
I will not enter here into the debate about whether lecturing hundreds of students in one large room is the best way to transmit knowledge in the YouTube age. Instead I will assume that lectures have their merits and that they are here to stay — at least for a while longer — as universities, like the rest of us, strive to adapt to the opportunities and challenges that come as a by-product of studying in the first half of the 21st century.
With this in mind, here are a few suggestions transpiring from what we’ve learnt using mobile technology at secondary school level. Since my lecturing experience is limited to professional development events and conference speaking, feel free to take them or leave them:
1 — Don’t compete with technology. Use it to your advantage
The chances are you often use a powerpoint presentation (or similar) and maybe even some multimedia resources. My suggestion is that you make these resources available online and encourage your students at the beginning of the lecture to open up the resources so that they can use annotation tools to add commentary and make notes on the side.
Tools such as OneNote, included in Microsoft’s Office 365 (which is free for students), are great for this. By doing this you will focus your students’ use of technology, encouraging them to engage with your content and resources, not other people’s.
Our students report that they find having the slides open locally on their own devices during a lesson very useful, often citing the example that if the teacher moves on too quickly, they can easily go back and forth to check facts and ensure understanding. My assumption is that this helps them by removing a degree of pressure and a not insignificant amount of the extraneous cognitive load intrinsic to the methodology.
An extra bonus is that this links in with what we know about the pedagogical benefits of self-regulation and being able to manage one’s own learning. Once these resources are made available online, students can easily return to them for further study, more effectively reinforcing what was learnt during the lecture.
2 — Use a variety of resources, including multimedia
I remember with great fondness the theatricality of a good lecture. For me, the best and most memorable lecturers were those who understood their students were an audience, and that engaging them intellectually required more than reading bullet points off a powerpoint.
Research suggests strongly that the mind responds well to multimedia input and that we learn better when words are combined with pictures and presented simultaneously. By incorporating multi-modal input into lectures, you will be providing mental stimuli that would be otherwise absent in a traditional chalk and talk lecture.
Put bluntly, by making your lectures more memorable and interesting, you will be maximising the chances that knowledge is acquired as well as minimising the temptation for your students to find interest elsewhere.
3 — Make your lectures more interactive
Undoubtedly mobile technology brings challenges into the lecture hall, but it also brings opportunities. Perhaps counterintuitively, it turns out that frequent low-stakes testing appears to be more useful to the learning than it is to the teaching.
Despite the fact that teachers mostly rely on a model structured thus study-study-study-test, research suggests that turning that on its head so it looks more like study-test-test-test may be a more effective model for improving learning outcomes.
If everyone in your lecture hall has access to a mobile device, you can easily put this into action by interweaving regular interactive quizzes — take a look at tools such as Kahoot, for example — to quickly gauge and test the knowledge obtained thus far in real time and, in so doing, making it more likely that the knowledge will stick.
4 — Have high behaviour expectations
I am assuming here that folk attending your lecture do so on the understanding that they will pay attention and that it is not OK, for example, to put their feet up, take out Fifty Shades and read it ostentatiously. I am assuming also that you would pick up students on such behaviour.
Of course, mobile technologies provide students with the opportunity to switch off more surreptitiously than that, but the principle is the same. Those with no interest in your lecture will find ways to disengage, technological or otherwise. Pick them up on it and suggest they make better use use fo their time.
In classrooms, restating behaviour expectations works well. My suggestion therefore is that you do the same in lectures. After you have explained to your students that they should open up your lecture resources and follow you lead through your exquisitely structured lecture, complete with multimedia input and opportunities to interact, you could reinstate your behaviour expectations with regard to the use of mobile devices.
You may well feel this ought not to be necessary at university level — probably quite rightly! But you also need to understand that your students have probably only ever associated mobile devices with the leisure pursuits as they were growing up, only using their computers occasionally when their school teacher felt the need to tick the ICT box. In order to more quickly make the transition and understand how to use mobile technology effectively for academic purposes, they will need your support and, above all, your guidance.
5 — Don’t dismiss technology as a distraction so out of hand
In order to understand about a subject, you must first know about it. So go on and make the effort to explore the intersection between learning and technology more deeply. Find out about when it works best and when it doesn’t, and, in doing so, challenge your own biases.
Yes, of course technology can be a distraction. But it needn’t be. This is the crucial bit. The judicious use of technology can demonstrably support and enhance the processes which we know work to improve learning outcomes. This is what we should be focusing on. Banning technology from lecture halls can be a solution, but I’m just not sure it is the right solution.
The reason for my thinking this is that technology is often dismissed for the wrong reasons: I’ve lost count of the times folk have dismissed mobile devices in schools after some research suggests that texting during lessons is distracting or that people who go on social networks during lectures don’t retain as much information as those who do pay attention – did we really need research to confirm this?
I’ve lost count of the times mobile devices have been dismissed because there is not an app for good teaching, as if their effective use and good teaching were mutually exclusive concepts.
The fact is that wherever mobile technology is used effectively (and these places do exist) mobile devices are not used for texting, for browsing social networks or to substitute the teacher with a suspect looking app. The fact is that when teachers and students use mobile technology appropriately, teaching and learning benefit as a result.
Surely this is the point.
Isn’t it?
