Chalkboard Lectures?

[HallowSwede]

I attended the recent Warwick open day and was surprised to see chalk still in use in the lecture hall. Other universities we have visited have boasted of technology meaning lecturers can write onto a laptop. This is projected onto the wall but also recorded for those unable to attend. I am assuming if Warwick use chalk it is a case of attend or miss the lecture. Also useful for revision to be able to watch again.
So I am curious to know what format most lectures are being given in nowadays?

My university had chalk or white boards (mathematicians can’t live without chalk apparently). They were filmed on the lecture recordings while PowerPoint slides and stuff on the visualiser (where there is a camera over a writing surface) were directly recorded, Each lecture recording had two frames, one of the lecturer and the board, one of the slides. I seldom used the board, usually just for answers to questions from the students but some lecturers prefer to write on the board still.

My university also records chalkboard presentations, with the camera tracking the lecturer.

I have read, although the reference escapes me now, that students can more easily follow the slower pace of writing that lecturers use on chalkboards.

I’m absolutely certain that the old process of the lecturer writing and students copying it down helped with learning. Especially with mathematics. Watching PowerPoint is so passive.

exxmaths teacher, secondary not HE

you need space to write. Nowhere near enough space on ppt presentations.

five or six chalkboards and you can refer back to the previous ones. They stay in vision unlike past slides.

Could also just be the preference of the individual in question, especially if senior. When I was a junior academic, a senior man in my humanities department only held classes after 4 pm, because he had a smallholding and liked to devote his daylight hours to it. He was a highly respected individually globally in his niche field, but had chosen never to progress beyond senior lecturer because he didn't want to extra admin/leadership etc.

(I mean, I think those days are gone, and he's been retired for decades, but some things are individual preference still.)

I am assuming if Warwick use chalk it is a case of attend or miss the lecture.

And what's wrong with that?

At my place, there's automatic lecture capture. Funnily enough, in my experience, the students who don't attend the lectures don't watch the lecture recording either.

You can take a horse to water ...

My experience of students is that many of those that don’t go to lectures struggle to keep up with content.

and then if there is stuff that requires their presence eg. Practicals/tutorials it can be even more daunting to go as they aren’t used to attending uni just interacting via a screen.

so I’d almost be encouraged by non recorded lectures…

And students can take photos of the boards if they need to.

When I was a maths student a multi-media presentation meant the lecturer was using two different colours of chalk.

DS was watching an undergrad engineering lecture recording this week (not Warwick but another top Stem uni) and it was a shot of the full chalkboard plus lecturer, so I assume it is fairly commonplace.

Pretty common for maths and I think engineering.

cambridge will still use blackboards and chalk for such lectures (possibly not all but definitely some).

Powerpoint is very limited for many subjects.

It is excellent for showing visual images or key structural points.

It is pretty rubbish for anything involving significant passages of text that students are meant to engage with (for example for a literary subject). Many lecturers for those use paper handouts instead, so that the students can scribble on them and also have the passages in front of them the whole time and keep on reflecting back on them rather than the text disappearing when the lecturer moves onto the next slide.

It is also pretty rubbish for anything where working needs to be demonstrated or paradigms worked through, compared to the old school way of just doing it on a blackboard or whiteboard - whether that's maths or languages.

Having blackboards doesn't mean lectures can't be recorded (whether it's a good thing or not to record lectures is a whole separate issue).

I believe there is some evidence that the physical act of notetaking and copying key information down (as opposed to passively watching slides appear and disappear) improves retention of information, but I can't remember the reference.

I believe there is some evidence that the physical act of notetaking and copying key information down (as opposed to passively watching slides appear and disappear) improves retention of information, but I can't remember the reference.

There's this (refers more to handwriting vs typing, though, but general conclusion is that handwriting is a Good Thing)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/#sec5-life-15-00345

These findings suggest that despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.