Hello, my name is Assistant Professor Kate Offer and I am a lecturer here in the law
school at UWA. I teach Torts and Evidence.
My movie is about using the lecture in the modern university and questions to whether
it's still a valid method or mode of instruction. It's a bit of a feeling that we're moving
away from in-person delivery to online delivery. And I think whilst there certainly has been
a move to that in the university sector, I don't think that's ever going to take over
from the need to get together and to be physically together, for students and staff, in a learning
environment. The big advantage of a university is that
it does provide that opportunity for people to get together in a community of learning
and be together. I think there will always be a need and the
desire for that to happen. I don't think that a lecture is necessarily
a bad thing. I think it can be a very useful method of
conveying some important introductory concepts to students.
I see a good lecture as one where the lecturer almost provides a bridge students can cross
over. They can be introduced to the material.
They can almost have their fear of the material removed and then they can cross over to where
you are, hopefully after you have given them some enthusiasm and sort of engendered some
excitement about the material that you're talking about.
I think one of the downsides of the lecture is that it can be misused.
Sometimes I think we see the word lecture in the timetable and think that requires us
to teach in a particular way. Whereas I think a lecture is really just a
situation. It's just an opportunity for people to get together.
I think a bad lecture is one which is a 45 minute exercise in information transmission,
that is just a one-way communication from the lecturer to the student.
There's an old joke that says a bad lecture is where the notes of the professor are passed
to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.
And I think if it's just about information transmission in a long 45 minute slot, people
can't concentrate for that long. It's not really learning. It's just note-taking.
So the lecture can certainly contain some information transmission but it shouldn't
be the bulk of the lecture. I feel that the lecture should be used as
an opportunity for some real learning to take place.
And there's a number of methods that I think are really useful to do that, that I've been
experimenting with in my own teaching. One of the first things I've been trying and
which I've found to be very successful is the use of online polling in lectures.
And incorporating some opportunities for students to discuss and learn from each other in the
lecture venue as well. So online polling is a very good way of keeping
students engaged in a large lecture. It's based on Eric Mazur who's a professor
of physics at Harvard University, his concept of peer instruction.
So using online polling is a way of getting students to talk about the concepts that we've
learnt, think about how those principles might apply and just nut out the way it might have
real world applicability as well. So that's been a particularly useful way of
bringing more engagement into the lecture. I'm Sarah Percy. I'm a professor of Political
Science and International Relations here at UWA.
I do a lot of lecturing to quite large lectures. So second year lectures with about 200 students
and first year lectures with about 350 students. I really enjoy trying to make the lectures
as interactive as possible. In my second year class I give them bonus
points for asking questions in a lecture and for every proper question you ask you get
a 2% bonus on your final exam to a total of 5%.
I teach International Relations so there's obviously a lot of topical stuff in the news.
So in our first year unit at the moment I'm trying to get them to start discussions about
the situation in Syria. I often try and stand at the back because
when I ask the questions and I want them to answer, I don't want the people in the front
row to always be the ones whose hands I pick. So I've tried Poll Everywhere which is an
online polling device. How I use it is I break them into small groups, I give them some time
to discuss the concept. I have them nominate one person who's their voter and they can
put stuff up in the free form text and all of those answers appear on the screen behind
me. Then we go through and talk about them. I do think a lot of the interactive stuff
is just about setting the tone. That's what you're going to do, that this is not going
to be you standing up talking to them and that you want them to participate.
I'm Wade Jarvis and I'm an Assistant Professor in the Business School and I have a particular
emphasis on the marketing discipline. We're saying a one-way delivery of a lecture
is not working. If you record it as well you get less students turn up. So there's an issue
in terms of getting students to participate. So I've been trying to blend a bit. I've got
audio to the chapter online, my ideal is I put the lectures online and then we do activities.
I've tried this in semester two and it's worked really well.
It's been difficult because you're up against people being used to a lecture so there's
issues around logistics of what do you call that. So I've had to call it a workshop.
The other thing I've tried to do is incorporate more demonstrations into law.
This year what I tried was an exercise in students getting to be eye witnesses. So what
we did was we surprised the students with an ambush. We had the Blackstone President,
who's the president of the Law Student Society, who was in on the game. He gave a short talk
at the beginning of the lecture and then he was ambushed by four naughty engineers. So
again we'd all set this up ahead of time. It all happened very quickly. Students weren't
expecting it. Then they had to give an eyewitness account.
It's a good experiment because there's a lot of literature about how difficult it is to
be an eyewitness and how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be. So it was a really good
opportunity for the students to be in that position and to have to give eyewitness testimony
and to see for themselves just how tricky it was.
I think it was good for the students to actually get to experience something rather than just
read about it as a theory. For me one of the reasons why I place a premium
on people coming to my lecture in person and actively participating is because it's the
conversations that happen before and after the lecture which are as critical to learning
as me talking in the lecture. My thoughts are that the lecture is going
to stay but we need to get them doing some skills value in there not just knowledge.
So as far as universities exist in the physical realm, which I think they will continue to
do, the lecture still has a valid place in universities and in university teaching. So
let's make the lecture something really special. Let's make it somewhere where true connection
can occur, where students can be engaged, where active learning can take place.