To wish my university lectures were... well, lectures

[reallyyyy]

I started a new course a few weeks ago, it's my second degree and it's a healthcare degree so that might be why. But our lectures are so interactive and filled with so many activities that feel like a waste of time. I had a 2 hour lecture today and 40 minutes of it was spent making posters of different topics to put on the board at the front, with the vision that we would be learning from each other. Only, we couldn't read the posters as they were too small and far away and it didn't teach us anything. There are also lots of 'discuss in pairs X, Y and Z' and it's not helpful or useful. It was nice in the first week as a bit of an icebreaker but now it just feels annoying.

I'm finding it frustrating sitting in a 2 hour lecture and being taught 1 hour of content. I'm not sure if it's because I studied a different degree before but lectures were 2 hours of information and I learnt a lot from them.

We have seminars too so it's not like I'm not enjoying the interaction, just not in a lecture.

I know IABU but I think I'm just overly tired from getting up at 5:30am to commute in for a lecture just to spend half the time making posters or colouring in diagrams.

Yanbu. I would struggle with this too. Are all sessions like this or is it just because it’s early days? Are there any options you can take?

Sounds ridiculous

Are you supposed to be doing additional reading before it? There’s a technique called flipped classroom which means that people do reading / preparation then come into a seminar based session to consolidate their learning.

Also, if it’s a healthcare course, they might also be looking at you developing softer skills which can’t be learned from being ‘taught’ or assessed.

YANBU stupid faddy rubbish - complain, and complain loud and long!

I completed my clinical degree several years ago and was similarly annoyed at this style of teaching. But now I work in the NHS and a lot of my time is spent learning from and with my colleagues, delivering presentations, making content for patient groups and occasionally posters. Actually, a lot of the activities we did on the course came in handy as nobody will be giving you lectures at work. You will have to learn from more experienced colleagues or chew on something together at case review meetings. And independent learning skills are also paramount. The only proper lectures we had were statistics and I forgot all the information as soon as I finished my exam and research project.

This is a big trend in medical education. I hate it.

I agree...there's a trend for making things more interactive but for me you can't beat a good lecture for a rewarding way to learn.

I think there is a place for the interactive stuff for certain topics such as ethics where discussion can be a useful part of understanding different viewpoints, but not for a fact based subject. Colouring in and making posters sounds like a complete waste of time!

This is how teaching has gone.

It's to do with educational theory.

Lectures come from the "old" way of teaching, where we (apparently) believed learners were empty vessels who needed filling with knowledge.

Now things are supposed to be taught with a minimum of teacher talking time, teachers are supposed to facilitate while students learn by doing activities and guessing at what they're actually learning (deductive learning, in educational jargon). It's implemented to varying degrees of success and things like your posters are supposed to show that learning is taking place where this wasn't really assessed when people just did lectures.

There's some value to this approach, but they've gone overboard with it and need to reign it in and remember educators actually do have more knowledge that's why they're teaching a bloody class and maybe it's not a bad thing for them to just share that knowledge with the learners and save us all hours of listening to rooms full of confused people scribbling with felt tip pens who won't remember what they covered today by next week because they weren't allowed to just listen and make some notes occasionally.

It happens in schools, too. We had a guest speaker visit during inset and spent 2 hours writing down what we already knew onto coloured post-its, then arranging them on giant pieces of paper and then telling them room why we put them in those groups. I learned nothing except that perhaps I could have an easier time being an educational consultant.

You know I saw a reddit where a woman said that all her lectures were prerecorded videos and when she looked into it it turned out that her tutor died years before, so she couldn't even ask him questions!

Imagine that.

I'm going g to find it and post it...

I cant find the reddit that I saw but did find this article where the same thing happened to a guy.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/beta.ctvnews.ca/local/montreal/2021/1/29/1_5288640.html

Yes, we are not allowed any longer to be the "sage on the stage" but the "guide on the side." Barf.

Hope things look up for you soon OP. Watching with interest as I’m also looking for something similar. Bit torn about the furry type ones -they look lovely and warm, but I do worry about looking like an actual teddy bear!

😮

Please tell me that it's not Leadership and innovation in Nursing. I'm starting it it march and dreading it. As I have absolutely no interest in it whatsoever!

Oops, wrong thread!

Come over to the humanities, OP. Today I have three lectures that involved me talking for 50 minutes apiece.

Personally I hate interactive classes. I'd rather just be able to sit and listen and take notes. Learn the knowledge from those who already know the knowledge not mess about with activities that you then have to present to the rest of the group.

Just going to leave this here: Compared with students in traditional lectures, students in active classes perceived that they learned less, while in reality they learned more.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

I think it's also a level up in learning. Once you are working at postgrad you are expected to be more self-directed and more of the learning is about critiquing and discussion. I don't disagree that it's annoying though. I am often thinking, 'You're the expert so why am I coming up with the ideas?'

Lecturers are encourage to design classes in this manner as of late - to do with the whole students as producers idea. As a lecturer, I don’t like it at all. I prefer the system of lectures where a lecture occurs and separate seminars allowing for student activity and discussion.

Don't blame your lecturers OP. The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), the body which inspects universities in the same way that OFSTED does schools, now expect the bulk of teaching to be student driven and if they sat in a lecture where the lecturer spent the whole two hours on delivery they would receive a very poor observation report.

It's based on the 'what I hear I forget, what I see I remember, what I do I understand'. The key phrase now is 'active learners', compared to listening to someone which is considered passsive.

It's not limited to healthcare, it's expected of all courses.

Are you seven? That sounds ridiculous and the opposite of being taught, which is what a lecture is for.

So funny that universities are going this direction whilst schools are going back to more trad methods. I’m doing an MA and all the teaching is like this, it’s really annoying. I just don’t care about my classmates inexpert experiences and opinions. It all feels very dumbed down compared to my undergrad.

I hear you. I realise different people respond to different learning styles but I just want to be told the information I need to learn as efficiently as possible. Give me bullet points!

I did a second degree and ended up ignoring most of the videos and audio content (they took sooo much longer to get to the point than just reading the textbook). Ended up not going to quite a few lectures too, but it was an arts degree and they were optional.