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.

The rest of my lectures this week were a lot better, so I think it may just be that individual lecturer. I think it's the fact it's a combination of a difficult and heavy science module that a lot of students are struggling with and wasting time on the posters, post-it notes, colouring in, etc. that is frustrating to me. The time would be better spent helping the students get up to speed with the content, or going over topics more slowly so people aren't left behind. It feels like we're rushing through it so that we have time for the activities.

What are the intended learning outcomes for the module? They may include something connected with the poster activity.

Those saying drs don't create posters, you do know that posters are an academic form of communication?! That researchers all around the world use. And are displayed at academic conferences. I can tell you, having also judged 100's of posters, that some are fantastic and get their point across, and some are hard to read, obscure and you just don't engage. That's what science communication is!

As for posters in your local GP surgery, yes, these are created on the ground all the time, and again people often do a rubbish job so that's an opportunity to communicate with the target audience missed.

Even if you never personally need to create a poster, all health-care professionals, at whatever level, need the skill underlying the task- which is to summarize and pull out the key points and communicate them clearly. Thats health-care 101.

Just speaking for two hours at a class and not reinforcing their knowledge, or broadening their skill base would be poor teaching.

I do get your frustration though OP, it sounds like the content side is being rushed through and you need more time to do it and reinforce it, might be worth a chat with one or two of the course leaders, they might be able to help with that or offer extra sessions (I do, in office hours, I see a few students a week who want a bit of extra input for any reason, illness, just wanting to get high grades). They might not have even realised they are going too fast for some of you.

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.

I've attended more academic conferences than I can count, and have also organised a fair few. I suspect what you're saying above is discipline-specific, becuase I've never yet seen one where anyone other than the various publishers, with their stalls of volumes relating to the key conference theme or discipline and their posters and flyers advertising these works, was creating or displaying posters.

The CFPs, advertisement and promotion of the event is all done online. The job of promoting the various panels, papers, round table discussions, etc, is done by the abstracts and the conference programme.

It boils down to the right form of teaching and assessment for the right discipline/sub-discipline. When university lecturing staff get this wrong, of course students are going to question what earthly use this is to their learning.

There were always had posters at conferences I attended. Though they were all designed to be read from no more than three feet away. They basically were shortened papers (abstract/intro/methods /results/conclusions). There would be rooms/halls/balconies set aside for their display. But they were very different from ‘advertising’ posters with colours/glitter/card. And were designed on computer printed out by someone with an A0 printer

Perhaps it’s my US-based perspective, but all this discussion on the value of posters is baffling me. Do doctor’s offices actually create their own posters to educate the public, and are those done by hand? My doctors’ offices will have a few printed out sheets of paper with one block of large print text, probably typed up in Microsoft Word, for things like “please use next window”; the rest is obviously boilerplate from either the state (such as Covid posters) or the healthcare system (info about renovations over at the hospital). Any charts or diagrams within the office were clearly purchased from a company that sells medical diagrams to medical offices.

I’m struggling to picture a time a marker/posterboard ever showed up in-office outside of maybe a Girl Scout fundraiser by the door… is this a cultural phenomenon?

MabelQ
I think people are focusing the output (a poster) with the purpose of the activity (eg the ability condense information down to the key points, the ability to select the most important messages to communicate, the ability consider how information is communicated, the ability to identify how different professionals in the same role might have different opinions on selecting the important information, a simple case of revision and going through the materials again in a different way).

The ability to communicate clearly, select the most important points for whoever you're talking to and present it clearly are good skills for most people in customer/patient-focused lines of work to have.

If the teaching methods across the whole course are out of balance then it's a problem, and one we had in secondary teaching a decade ago, but there's some throwing baby out with the bathwater on the thread.

I've attended more academic conferences than I can count, and have also organised a fair few. I suspect what you're saying above is discipline-specific

Probably, I’m assuming that you have never organised or attended anything science related.

Really interesting isn’t it? It would be really unusual to attend a healthcare conference without academic posters (which sounds very different from what OP describes)

I think a lot of people haven’t come across academic posters. They were unknown in the most academic subjects, certainly arts and humanities 30 years ago and things were still presented through ‘papers’.

very common now in STEMM disciplines.

Academic posters are very much a thing. The course I teach on uses them for one of the summative assessments. Some of my students presented posters at an academic exhibition recently.

I just spent 10 mins driving myself crazy trying to remember the word 'seminar' so I could ask if it was possible they were doing a 1h lecture and a 1h seminar in a 2h block.

Finally remembered it then re-read the OP... a lesson in reading the OP properly first time around!

I remember creating an academic poster for a conference during my PhD 30 years ago.

very common now in STEMM disciplines.

As I have just posted on another HE thread, posters were a thing when I started teaching in HE nearly 35 years ago.

Conferences, especially smaller ones, only have a very limited amount of time to present oral papers. Posters enable much larger numbers of researchers to present their work which makes the conference much more attractive to both those presenting and those looking to network and find out about other work in the area (posters are often presented months, or even years, before journal publication; often presenting work in progress). Generally we were expected to at minimum present a poster at any conferences we attended.

Did a humanities PhD in the late 1990s, I assure you we were all presenting off papers we had written! There were no posters at any of the conferences I went to and we still got students to write essays to be assessed. My career since then has been in STEMM in HEI and I first came across academic posters in the UG capacity about 20 years ago, I’d not been involved in PGR side in this area.

We regularly had to do them in med school (ie undergrad) in the late 90s.

It was a massive pain! Having to send your PowerPoint to the library A0 plotter two weeks in advance. I also remember having to do end-of-project presentations on an OHP, and having to print out your PowerPoint slides onto transparencies and hoping you didn’t feed them in wrong and melt them into the printer 🤣

PowerPoint?! In my day we had to print them out in pieces on normal A4 paper and back them with card.

I remember having to finish my undergrad project two weeks before deadline to have time to send it to get printed out on the laser printer (you picked up your printing a few days later from a pigeon hole in the computing department) then get soft-bound at the library. I had a picture in mine - a black and white line drawing - which took the printer 15 minutes to think about before printing so people kept thinking the printer had crashed and cancelled my print job.

Then again, my father had to pay a typist to type up his handwritten PhD on a manual typewriter,,.

My first degree we could still hand write essays. My housemates in my first year went halves on an electronic typewriter which was very fancy. Then in Year 2 I bought an ancient secondhand 386 PC for about £300 which was a fortune in the early 90s. I was probably ripped off. It got stolen within a year as well!

I’m doing my nursing degree through the OU and they do a thing called enquiry based learning where the tutor doesn’t actually teach you anything but you are given a case study to go and research a set question through articles etc and present your findings, I really don’t like it

I don’t understand…you listen and make notes. Then you read them back and read around the published literature. You do some revision work to aid retention. You aren’t supposed to know it all after one lecture.

But the lecture is supposed to be the first step, point in gout the main areas and summarising things a bit! You are supposed to learn by talking that and reading a round it, discussing it in seminars and tutorials (and in the bar) and when you plan and write your essays.
If you use notes and abbreviations it’s not at all impossible to keep up with the headlines.
Have lecturers been forced to change because so many undergraduates don’t understand what their part in learning is supposed to be?

In my degree we did both. Traditional lectures and then seminars and tutorials where we discussed both the knowledge from lectures and from wider reading advised in them.

My second degree (also healthcare) was entirely PRoblem based learning. Not a single lecture or seminar in three years! 🙈😂

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.

you can use AI to take notes in lectures for you now! 😆. I saw some tiktok videos on it the other day.