Higher education is in the middle of vast change which should, hopefully, see it emerge far stronger than it was before. The idea of packing 2-300 students into a small hall to talk at them for 55 minutes at a time is no longer quite as appealing as it used to be. There are faster, better, and more effective ways to educate, teach, and learn.
That it took us to the point of global pandemic to action these changes should be one of our more major regrets. The model we used until early 2020 is now centuries old and looking every bit of its age. In its defence: it has produced some of the greatest scientists, physicians, and professionals of the modern era. Almost every person who has impacted the world has come through it at some point in life. With that in mind, how bad can it be?
Even before the events of 2020, the rapid change of the last two decades has left many parts of academic life feeling borderline archaic. Time, money, and attention has been wasted blending technology and traditions in a way which has most often produced the worst of both.
This year, the issues presented have only gotten worse. Physical presence, previously mandatory and graded, is now expressly forbidden with institutions and schools scrambling to put together a roughly comparable education program.
Showing Your Working
The intermittent solution to continued education has been to simply shift the traditional university lecture to video format. As a temporary bandage to fix an immediate problem — this has worked surprisingly well. To their credit, most institutions have adopted commercially available tried and tested technologies to apply to the problem. An idea which was obvious, though drastically underused in previous years.
Despite working well short term; both traditional lectures and Zoom education leave a lot of room for necessary improvement.
It’s well understood that practical hands-on experience engaging with a topic beats passive viewing every time. If we’re talking about music, arts, craft, or sport the idea of the majority of your learning being lecture-based would be laughable.
Yet, the principles aren’t all that different for STEM topics. Studies show active participation beats almost always beats passive observation. [1]
Why the Long Lecture?
It’s not just the current crisis which has created a need for drastic change. We’ve long known there are better ways to learn and more effective ways to teach. Lectures persist, not because they are more effective, but because they are one of the easiest ways to organise and teach large groups in a single sitting.
Education programs which fit a multi-plex cinema better than a library environment do represent excellent value for money, but not for the student. That education is something being dispersed at them rather than to, or with, them should be a primary point of concern.
“University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw. Lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics.”
― Virginia Woolf
The Modern-Day
From personal experience, lectures in programming often feel like a particularly strange way to fit the new world to old methods.
Academics reading directly from the textbook to a captive audience has always represented a poor use of time for both parties. Reading directly from technical manuals and API documentation takes that idea to a whole other level.
These weren’t inexperienced, or bad lecturers either, by a long shot. In the computer lab, where practical experience is built, they were helpful, engaging, and enthusiastic about the topic. They taught well, both on the syllabus and in areas that were far above and beyond what was on-topic.
Whether there was a required number of lecturing hours to hit, or prizes for performance art, I’ll never know. Regardless, Reading out loud the various layers of the TCP/IP stack, or going through the Java API line-by-line was far from engaging, educational, or there to enthuse anyone about the topic.
The current model of education comes from a time where resources, tools, and materials were far scarcer than they are now. It’s a system designed at a time when mechanical copies were scarcely imaginable. Had instant communications, unlimited learning resources, and programmable learning tools been available at the time — I have no doubt they would have invented something very very different.
“College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.” — Harry Loyd Millar (Often attributed to Mark Twain)
Rapid Change, Not Before Time
We are in a situation now where gradual slow change has given way to rapid enforced shifts. A well-planned, more controlled change to better ways of doing things would be much preferred, but momentum and resistance mean that such changes may have never happened.
So far, the major shift in education has been to replace in-person lectures with telepresence versions. It would be a dire state of affairs if the most impactful thing to come out of a revolution in education was slightly better streaming or a faster way to share documents.
We know for a fact that 55 minutes spent on tutorial work, interactive engagement, and mental ‘heavy-lifting’ is many times more valuable than 55 minutes being talked at. Group work, regular check-ins, even web toys are some of the best tools we have.
If we don’t shift towards more engaging ways of learning, as a way to combat the negative effects of remote learning if nothing else, it would be an infuriating use of a bizarre year.
Breaking topics down into exercises or subjects which can be worked on, discussed, and played with does so much more for learning than regurgitating the textbook in animated form. At a certain level, you need to let students read for themselves, to come to class with the ideas already to debate, challenge, and work with them in a productive environment.
If this sounds like an easy change — it isn’t. It’s a difficult balancing act and one which has to be carefully crafted to ensure every student has a chance to participate. Particularly those less-inclined to put themselves in the centre of a debate, or those excluded for any number of complex reasons. As with any shift or change, there are challenges to be overcome, but they are challenges that are far from insurmountable.
The reason this isn’t in-place already is precisely because it’s hard to do. Lecturing, simply regurgitating information year-after-year is comparatively easy. Changing for no good reason, creating new work out for little reason would have been idiotic.
There’s a chance now. Global upheaval and an enforced shift to the traditional order of things has meant the old way of working is no longer a viable option for the time being. If changing the old way of doing things would have been idiotic, wasting this chance to implement drastic change would be even worse still.
Things are different now, markedly so. We have a chance to make them better. If we go back to the old way of working, with perhaps better recording and web capabilities to show for it, we’ll have wasted something quite extraordinary for many years to come.
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