The Changing Shape of Lectures

by Marie Norman

Ah, lectures…the most maligned of pedagogies. Is there a place for them in the modern educational landscape?

The answer is yes. And no.

Lectures are still one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to convey information to large groups of people. Moreover, when they are used appropriately and done well, lectures can play a valuable role in learning. As Burgan points out, “Excellent lecture sessions raise questions in ways that inspire students to seek answers together” while a good lecturer’s “passionate display of erudition” has value in and of itself. Kotso observes, moreover, that lectures often provide the framing and fodder for informed discussion and debate. Far from stifling thought, a good lecture can be thought provoking, informative and memorable, as anyone who has watched a TEDTalk can attest.

At the same time, there’s a strong case — one supported by decades of research — that lectures should be used far more tactically and sparingly than they often are (and they are still used extensively, as research by Hurtado et al attests.) For all that the best lectures can inspire students, they aren’t a particularly effective catalyst for deep learning and should only be used if they are short and combined with opportunities for problem solving, discussion, application, questioning, reflection, etc. Moreover, there’s a very real question of whether lectures have outlived most of their usefulness. We now live in a world bursting at the seams with information, where lectures are, arguably, no longer as necessary as they were in the Middle Ages, when they were invented and when other sources of expert information were few and far between.

So how exactly should you use lectures, particularly in online courses? One excellent idea is to focus lectures only on the knowledge and perspectives that you, the instructor, can uniquely impart, letting textbooks and digital resources convey basic factual knowledge. For example, you might:

• Use lectures to illuminate what Meyer and Land call “threshold concepts”: core disciplinary ideas that hold the key to helping students “think like a(n) ____ (historian, economist, computer scientist.)
• Use lectures to home in on what Perkins has identified as “troublesome knowledge”: particularly tricky or difficult concepts with which students habitually struggle.
• Use lectures to connect course materials to the real world, by highlighting real-world cases and examples, e.g., from the instructor’s professional experience.

So is there a place for lectures in modern education? Yes. But it may not be the place they’ve held traditionally: the transmission of basic information. Instead, lectures can play an even more essential role: offering the insider perspectives, expert synthesis, and passionate excitement for the field that only the instructor can provide.