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.

Yep, I know of a masters course where a lecturer passed around sparkly stickers to use as part of their poster work. 🙄

Ds (ASD) has just started uni a couple of years after his peer group and coincidentally, was complaining about this last night.

He’s doing a computing subject and has relatively high contact hours compared to some subjects. One day a week he is in for 8 hours of lectures, so four two hour sessions. Last week he spent half the day - in his words - “playing with lego” and another two hours on a similar type of ‘interactive group activity’.

He finds the forced social aspect of this type of learning stressful and exhausting and is also getting increasingly frustrated by the seemingly large numbers of ‘coasters’ in these sessions who just sit back and let the rest of the group do the work, then it’s submitted as collaborative. (Although that did show up in their first round of assessments recently.) Ds is genuinely passionate about his subject, so does a lot of self-directed learning at home, but he feels like he is then having to effectively teach that knowledge to the coaster students during these sessions.

The career he is aiming for and would be expected from this particular course after uni will require minimal teamwork, so the teaching style of the course is effectively at odds with the subject/prospects.

When he had his DSA assessment they set him up with tech to support him with recording and note taking in lectures. Now, at two months in, he hasn’t been able to use it yet.

When I was an undergraduate 1999-2002 ALL of my lectures were delivered in this didactic fashion. I learnt practically nothing in them.

Unless you have a dynamic lecturer, they will stand and talk at you for 1-2 hours and you need to try to keep up with them and take notes. No normal undergraduate can write as fast as a person talks.

When you spend 1-2 hours trying to write what someone is saying, you're essentially focusing on transcription rather than actually learning anything.

Just because you write something down, doesn't mean you will remember it later let alone understand it.

Lectures like this are very frustrating... and I'd argue, lazy teaching.

Following this with interest, although it’s many years since I taught at University.

It just occurred to me that I go to quite a few ‘societies’ at local levels (gardening, local history, art, general ‘interest’ groups). At all of them, people sit in a darkened room listening to a lecturer speaking with the aid of slides for about 45 minutes. The questions at the end seem to demonstrate that most attendees have listened, understood and thought about the presentation…..

I found the complete opposite. I was at Uni at the same time and the vast majority of my labs were chalk and talk. They were generally excellent - well structured, and delivered using overhead projectors, with lecturers doing worked examples as necessary. Having to take notes forces you to engage with the subject very effectively. Yes, there were some crap lecturers but we were at Uni, FFS, and perfectly capable of helping ourselves via textbooks. We also had supplementary tutorials and extensive lab work.

Perhaps it depends on the subject, I did History and Politics. No lab work. I got more out of the seminars for which I and to prepare in advance and then discuss with a small group.

I can literally remember nothing from the lectures. Except having wrist ache from trying to keep up with a lecturer.

@DangerousDora Ds is genuinely passionate about his subject, so does a lot of self-directed learning at home, but he feels like he is then having to effectively teach that knowledge to the coaster students during these sessions.

I sympathise with your DS and other neurodivergent students who find this type of education stressful. But what you describe in your quote here, can actually work to your son's advantage. As the expression goes, the best way to understand a concept is to teach it to others. It might feel unfair to your son, but by explaining it to others he is further developing his own understanding of the topic. If asked 2 weeks later what they remember, I'd expect your son to have a reasonably good retention of what he learned (and better than if he had only studied independently at home), whereas the students who had it explained to them by your son will most likely have forgotten most of it.

@Alaimo That’s a good point actually and possibly borne out by ds getting top marks in his first lot of assessments, apparently significantly ahead of the majority of the group.

Thank you. I will pass that on to him, it may help him see things a bit more positively.

I see a few people have said this is a very noughties style of learning. I wonder if this reflects the time those implementing this were themselves trained?

I had lectures, never two hours though - 50 minute ones so if two in a row had travel time/break. We also had tutorials and 3 hour practicals. In my final year we had some seminar types where groups were set different topics to prepare talks on and present. I hated those as there were always students who couldn’t be bothered. But the real problem came with the exam and your exam question (3 x 1 hour essays) was on a topic another group had presented. So they had done the in depth reading on that topic rather than you and didn’t share their material and what they presented was not up to scratch. Yes you could have read up but by that stage we were beyond the ‘neatly and concisely present in textbooks’ stage of knowledge so researching all the topics from scratch was impossible (hence being given a topic per group in the first place).

@DangerousDora

I would be inclined to argue that your DS’s uni are contravening the Equality Act. One of the reasons schools now use direct instruction/retrieval practice/silent completion of tasks is because it is proven to benefit ND students (including ADHD, who already have an unmanageable cognitive load without faffing around ‘co-creating’). Universities who do mad co-teaching nonsense are MASSIVELY behind the research curve on this one.

NB I’ve just completed an MSc remotely so I have experienced it from the other side. We were remote, so we learned by online lectures and reading, not ‘co-creating’.

Sounds very woolly

The point is no one size fits all so there will be some activities others like but you don’t. The key is to gave a range of activities.

and comparing children’s learning with adults is pointless.

re ND. There is no contravention of the Equality Act. Students usually have personal learning plans where reasonable adjustments can be made.

I really enjoyed having a mix of seminars with group work and straight lectures where you took notes. Wouldn't have enjoyed only having one sort.

While I can believe that teaching what you have learnt to others can consolidate learning it's a bit convenient isn't it. The students aren't being paid to teach others and a lot of people will just be coasting.

Talking at someone for an hour is now considered bad practice so a range of learning strategies being used is actually a good thing. However, poster making doesn't sound like it's teaching them anything and should be done in students' own time as a consolidation task.

FWIW lecturers' teaching skills vary greatly and some are just shit. Many places make them do an HE teaching qualification which can help, but some are employed on the strength of their research/grants they can bring in rather than their teaching ability. This is not helpful for the students but the university has the REF to think about...

I'm glad a lot of you agree with me, I thought I was BU. I'm definitely going to mention it in the feedback forms. It's extra frustrating as this particular module is particularly difficult, and it feels like the lecturer whizzes through the complicated slides to then waste time on lots of activities that aren't helpful.

Interesting that a few of you mentioned autism/neurodiversity as I've been wondering about whether I'm potentially neurodiverse lately. My first degree was a heavy scientific degree and I would skip nearly all of my lectures and go through the content at home which worked really well for me and I graduated top of my cohort. I'd love to skip these lectures but attendance in person is monitored and mandatory due to it being an NHS course.

YABU
Lecturers would love to lecture for 2 hrs too as its much easier than managing classes and encouraging peer to peer learning but you wouldn't learn as much. The old school standing in a lecture room doesn't work for most students and is generally a sign of a lazy lecturer not up to date with the latest approaches. that is why your lecturers are interactive and a mix of both. Particularly post covid. The other issue lecturers are facing is that covid kids have no social skills - covid teens who are in college now have no social skills and employers expect them. So we are having to add this element into our teaching so that our students have a vague hope of getting and keeping a job. So yeah. Maybe you are finding the social element more challenging than you are admitting and that's translating into anger? Perhaps have a look at that. And make sure you do all your reading ahead of class so you can participate fully.

Are these group discussions and activities taking place in traditional lecture theatres with potentially 200+ students? How would noise levels be managed? Getting stressed just thinking about it.

The seminars I remember we're more like 20 at most and in smaller rooms

This is one reason autistic dd has opted for OU. That style of teaching is completely inaccessible to her.

Also in terms of feedback: I wouldn't overdo the feedback regarding you thinking you know how best to create a lecture that works for most students. Your lecturer would have to have some level of training to have their position and poster making as a one-off would be encouraged as a group creative learning response. The comments here and the rush to agree with you seem to be more from those who studied a long time ago or whose kids aren't adjusting to college. And the reason for this is that these kids have spent way way too much time alone with computer screens doing "self directed study" (which has a very poor impact on mental health long term) or who are used to poor levels of secondard school didactic teaching. Self directed study has its place but most jobs require high levels of interaction, particularly NHS jobs, and part of what is being assessed for you is what the NHS call "working well with others" which will be on your job spec for the next 30 years if you want a career there. So perhaps focusing on why you don't enjoy this would serve you best.

Ugh I hate this kind of thing where the majority of the ‘content’ from the expert is just them asking the class to share their thoughts/ideas/experiences. No I don’t want to hear a bunch of random people share their thoughts I want to hear what you the so called experienced expert has to say about this topic which is why I’ve signed up to this training in the first place

Unless you have a dynamic lecturer, they will stand and talk at you for 1-2 hours and you need to try to keep up with them and take notes. No normal undergraduate can write as fast as a person talks

The sensible ones listen to the lecture, engage with the lecturer, and write up their notes later while watching the recording of the lecture.

Agree. A lecture is a lecture, or should be.

YANBU, I like a good old fashioned lecture, too.

It's early days and they tend to get a bit less whizzy and interactive as the course goes on in my experience.

As for how ND students cope - I just did, the same way most of us did - do the task in 3 minutes and spend another 10 chatting about crap... however after a year of it shifted online, the words "I'm just going to pop you in randomly allocated breakout rooms" still bring me out in a cold sweat because face-to-face you're generally sat next to people you get on with, but that yawning abyss as the screen goes black and you wait to see who you're going to be making awkward small talk with for the next 10 minutes seems like a decade.

@lauraloulou1 the thing is, my son has settled in and adjusted to student life beautifully, far better than we could ever have hoped. Probably because he delayed going until he was ready, worked for a while in between - so he is used to woking in a team - and is living at home rather than in halls.

He understand the need for a mix of learning and they have different sessions that are supposed to accommodate that, but over 5 hours of it back to back on one day, timetabled as ‘lectures’, is too much. They have seminars and group sessions on other days, which I (and he) would expect to be more interactive and team based.