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.

I'd be interested to know when it went out of fashion to hand out lecture notes before lectures?

I've always found it good to annotate lecture notes during the lecture, which of course means you don't have to be furiously writing down the entire lecture into your own notes (paper or laptop).

I never realised that they don't do that anymore until DS was talking to me about it when he was in year 1 at Uni. He seemed to spend hours "writing up" his notes after each lecture, and I wondered why, and it turned out he was spending the lecture copying down whatever was on the screen/board (slides etc), so concentrating on note writing instead of listening/understanding, and then re-watching the lectures afterwards and writing up his notes in "neat" format and trying to work out what it all meant! Then it came to revision time, and he couldn't remember most of it, so had to "revise" by basically re-watching all the lectures a third time!

I told him to turn it all around, get the slides/lecture notes printed out beforehand, so that during the lecture, he had the notes and the slides in paper in front of him and that he should just make small notes/annotations to the printed versions, use highlighter pens, sticky tabs, etc - i.e. all the "old fashioned" type of things, so he could be reading and listening at the same time as brief note making. Apparently no one had ever suggested that to him, and it transformed the way he studied and revised! When it came to revision, he breezed through it because instead of reading all the notes again, he could just concentrate on what he'd highlighted or tabbed!

Sometimes, I do wonder about the modern/fad teaching methods. There was a reason the "old fashioned" methods stood the test of time - they worked! The only problem with printing out all the slides/notes was the enormous cost, but I think he saw the value in doing it so reluctantly paid up!

(Yes, I know you can flag and highlight things in online notes too, but personally I prefer something to touch rather than spending even more time staring at a screen, and my son actually agrees, despite him spending most of his day on devices - he brought half a car full of paper files back home with him after graduation!)

Because if you have 350 students in a lecture, and 30 slides thats environmentally unfriendly. Students are expected to turn up prepared. Many have tablets or laptops and annotate slides on screen. You also rarely get everyone turning up. It would be a massive waste of paper. Where I work lecture notes must be made available the week before and it is recommended clearly to students that they should download slides ahead of time, do recommended reading etc and come prepared.

Also, at 18 and having done a whole school career worth of assessments, including A levels, we expect students to have study skills. There are almost always also study skill pages available at the university library etc. Lecturers are categorically not expected to teach adults how to study. If your son wasn't aware it's because he hasn't engaged, not the lecturers fault.

Nowadays I'd expect to be able to do the annotating and highlighting of lecture notes on a tablet of some kind rather than print outs.

Surely it's more a matter of personal preference than having someone else's preferences forced onto you. That's why I'd prefer to see more information upfront about type of teaching/lecturing and more choice so the students can make informed choices as to unis, subjects and modules.

Oh that. I'd be pretty annoyed if what I thought was going to be a lecture turned out to be an absolute racket of 200 odd people all talking over each other while doing group work in a massive echoey room. That's simply not a lecture and sounds really unpleasant.

I’m ND and I find this style of teaching much much easier but I have ADHD and actually like interacting with people and why I went into health care. I just can’t concentrate on 2 hours of lectures 🥱😴

It is all available. Course descriptions have lists of modules. Theres module catalogues detailing content, style of assessment, how it is taught etc.

Lectures, seminars, group work, practical work is all released ahead of time. Students can download onto a tablet to annotate digitally or print off if they prefer a paper copy. They can download into specialist software as it must be accessible, including software specifically to help neurodivergent students.

Everything is absolutely available for students to make an informed choice. But they are adults at uni, not school, and are expected to show initiative and do that rather than have their hands held and walked through it.

@WhatPostDoc

But they are adults at uni, not school, and are expected to show initiative and do that rather than have their hands held and walked through it.

And yet, it seems some unis/lecturers think that forcing their students to sit around drawing posters is a good use of "adult" learning time!! Are such pointless and childish exercises outlined in the module information notes provided to students?

I'd be interested to know when it went out of fashion to hand out lecture notes before lectures?

It started with the internet about thirty plus years ago.

Oral vivas are a big part of university assessment. I'm unsure why you think asking a group to make a poster on a topic/results from their experimental work etc and presenting it to the rest of the room is a waste of time? Or any different to a group power point presentation? It's practise for their assessments.

Or would you rather your son never did any poster then was suddenly asked to make one and present it for 20% of his grade having had zero practice or feedback during his learning time?

We did do group work and posters but not in the middle of a lecture because that's not what a lecture is.

If we are going down the route of expecting people to make clear what a course involves and pick what suits then we need to stop calling these things lectures because it's going to confuse people. It's like me advertising a disco but when everyone gets there they have to sit still in complete silence meditating or something. Words have meanings and that gives people expectations.

Luckily his degree didn't include any of that nonsense in the final grading. Obviously had he done a course where 20% of the final mark was on that kind of thing, he'd have accepted and prepared for it! But where it won't be, i.e. the majority of courses, it's a pointless teaching gimmick. Even so, though, I remember one of his school home works in something like year 8 being to prepare a poster, so he'd already had experience and it's not really rocket science anyway.

Exactly. Comes back to options, and making informed choice and Unis being open and honest!

My son is still annoyed at being lied to by his Uni who promised "blended learning" when they conned their students into contracting for student accommodation in Summer 2020, at a time when the Uni had already told lecturers it would all be online (as confirmed by several lecturers and other staff!). Funny how they changed their website to say "mostly online" the week after their portal for accepting accommodation was closed - as evidenced by screenshots we have taken from the webpage history website (Wayback).

The way some Unis treat their students is awful.

Luckily his degree didn't include any of that nonsense in the final grading.

Quite a few do, and the further up the academic ladder you go, the more likely it is.

This is a massive question. In the past universities were only for people whose learning style would enjoy lectures. Universities have now expanded. The idea was that more young people would be able to access this level of education. However there is anecdotal evidence that the wider student body has required a dumming down of courses. Nevertheless it appears that graduates can perform just as well in graduate jobs afterwards and it fact employers want more soft skills

I would not expect more than one hour of lecture at a time. One hour is more than enough of someone talking at you, and given that most people's attention spans are about 20-25 min, that's still quite long. We do 50 min lectures, and I pause for a bit around the middle to allow everyone a second wind of concentration!

One pressure for universities is that students and parents keep demanding more 'contact time'. Or rather, they say that's what they want. Our uni then switched to two hour lectures instead of one hour lectures as that's what everyone wanted apparently. This turned out not to be true, many students complained about the two hour lectures and now we are having one hour lectures again with a separate interactive seminar...students always say they want more contact, but many fail to use the contact hours they have, so we are in this loop of pleasing/not-pleasing everyone.

I think two hours of just a plain lecture is unsustainable for most and so I don't blame the person running it for trying to put in some more interactive.

If you are in healthcare, then learning to put together a readable poster is a valuable skill, perhaps you have learned something about font size and taking account of all potential readers as well as on the topic. Many posters in waiting rooms I've been in fail on both fronts.

One of my current assignments is a poster. But the lecturer doesn't use our two hours a week of lecture time to watch us sit and colour it in because that would be a massive waste of time.

Perhaps you want the lecturers to do all the work for you? Listening to a lecture is passive learning. You retain more information through active learning. Trust your teacher’s knowledge and experience.

There seems to be one in every class: that student who thinks they know better than the tutor how to teach the class. They usually want to be spoon fed information because they are not that excited by learning per se and just see education as a means to an end (getting a job) when it can be very rewarding. In its own right.

If you're really going to learn how to do a poster you're going to benefit from being taught by someone who knows about things like font size and layout. Being let loose on the coloured card and glitter in a noisy lecture theatre won't teach you much.

I think it's easy to get hung up on the idea that posters are awful, what's the point, my child doesn't do even do posters etc.

Whilst I get the desire for traditional lectures and agreed that too much mass participation feels like a gimmick, some time consolidating the topic into a reduced format that has the main points in an effective way isn't an unreasonable task if used appropriately.

Seriously? How many doctors are going to write a poster themselves, or accountants, or surveyors, etc?

Firms engage marketing consultants to do things like that - you know, professions where they're actually taught to do that kind of thing and do it as they day job so have lots of experience.

As for font size etc., surely it's common sense to use readable fonts, choose sensible colour scheme, etc. You don't need to be taught that - it's pretty basic stuff that should come from life experience (i.e. general observation of what posters look like, what works and what doesn't). I'm sure most people actually have their eyes open when they walk around!

Unless you're aiming for a career which involves poster creation, that kind of thing belongs back at the start of secondary school, not university!

Exactly, it's more like year 8 art class at secondary school!

I think it's easy to get hung up on the idea that posters are awful, what's the point, my child doesn't do even do posters etc

If you attend an academic conference you will see a lot of posters, created by grown adults. Some of them are awful and some are very good. Good posters draw more people to look at them and they look at them for longer. If you want your research to reach the widest audience a good poster is essential.

Being let loose on the coloured card and glitter in a noisy lecture theatre won't teach you much.

I have set posters as coursework and assessed hundreds, maybe thousands, of posters over the years but, I must admit, it isn’t something I would be encouraging. Most are created on computer these days and printed when necessary.