
The Case Against Lectures - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/the-case-against-lectures
======
chasedehan
The science really is accurate with regards to the lecture being outdated and
not effective. However, problems abound with regards to implementing different
methods in higher ed.

For example, I was previously a Financial Economics Professor and "flipped"
the classroom for my introductory corporate finance class. This means that the
students watched prerecorded video lectures at home and then worked out their
"homework" in class. So basically, the students had someone (me) to ask
questions of when they hit stumbling blocks. Pedagogically, this has shown
improvements in learning achievements.

HOWEVER, the problem I ran into is pretty similar to what I have heard from
every other faculty member (across disciplines and universities) who has
attempted to do this. The problem is that we repeatedly hear from students
that "he didn't even teach us anything, he just made us watch videos." This
wasn't just one or two students, this was an overwhelming majority. The other
problem I ran into was that students thought there was no benefit to coming to
class (even when you include attendance as part of their grades). The number
of students dropping the course at the last 'W' deadline skyrocketed.

For me, it became a challenge to continue to do it this way, even though I
spent 3+ months full time over a summer producing videos of my lectures, and
eventually went back to the "chalk and talk". My student opinion polls went
back up.

I'm not entirely sure of what the solution to the problem is, but project
based learning does greatly enhance learning. That needs to be baked into the
institution.

~~~
sykh
I’ve been doing flipped classrooms for nine years now. I teach mathematics at
a community college. What I’ve found so that students drop out much sooner in
my flipped classroom style versus traditional lecture style class. But the
overall rate hasn’t changed.

Students can’t fake it in my flipped classroom style. If they come unprepared,
and this is obvious when it happens, I don’t help them doing the problem sets
in class. I only help the students who are prepared. The lectures they are
supposed to watch have been created by me. I create my own content. The
slackers die off quickly in my format. This makes for a much better end of
semester for me and the remaining students.

There is no cure for apathy. If they don’t want to work they won’t. They’ll
blame whatever they can regardless of format.

I do wonder how success is measured in the article. Is it passing rate? That’s
easy to increase. Has the material been mastered better in alternative format
classes? That should be the real test of success. To date I’ve never
encountered an institution that measures success correctly.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" There is no cure for apathy. If they don’t want to work they won’t. They’ll
blame whatever they can regardless of format."_

That's a little harsh, and also doesn't even acknowledge that the teacher has
any responsibility to engage their students and spark their interest in the
subject.

Students might not do their homework and engage with the subject for all sorts
of reasons apart from apathy. They might have depression, be too stressed out,
or have a host of other emotional problems that affect their performance and
engagement. They might have taken on too large of a course load, or might not
be getting enough sleep because of work they're doing outside of school or be
preoccupied in taking care of their family. In some schools, the students' own
safety, or that of their family, might be their overwhelming preoccupation.

When I was young, I had a lot of trouble motivating myself in subjects I
didn't find interesting, but excelled in those I did. You could call the cause
of my performance in the former subjects "apathy", but the teacher also has a
role to play here, and need not be just a helpless bystander.

On occasion I was lucky enough to have talented teachers who were able to
interest me in subjects that I found completely uninteresting before I took
their class. But way too often I had teachers who would read straight out of
the textbook during class, who you could tell really did not enjoy teaching,
or who just weren't particularly good at it.

In those cases, the students have to rely on whatever interest they have in
the subject to keep them going. If they don't have that interest, then they
have to find motivation some other way. This can be difficult for kids who are
still maturing and finding their way in the world.

My own performance at university improved tremendously when I went back after
working for many years, and I was able to harness a tremendous motivation that
I just didn't have when I was younger. I was also able to eliminate
distractions, focus completely on performing well at school, and over the
years had finally learned how to learn (a skill usually not taught at school).
As a result I greatly outperformed virtually all the rest of my much younger
classmates.

Finding a sense of direction, becoming effectively self-motivating, seeing
academic performance as more important than partying or other outside
interests, knowing how to learn, understanding how tough it is as an adult in
the "real world" and what a difference having skills and knowledge could make,
having a genuine interest in the subject matter, valuing knowledge and
learning for their own sake, and many other things that could help students
perform academically are things that schools could help students with, but
unfortunately usually they don't.

~~~
sykh
The statements you quoted are about apathetic students. Do you have a cure for
apathy in learning? I don't.

Teachers come in a variety of talents and have a variety of teaching styles.
One thing that colleges do poorly is align a student's learning style with a
teacher's teaching style. Is a teacher supposed to be a great motivator? I
don't know. I do know that I'm not particularly good in the inspiration
department. I'm enthusiastic. I think I'm good at explaining stuff.

 _Students might not do their homework and engage with the subject for all
sorts of reasons apart from apathy. They might have depression, be too
stressed out, or have a host of other emotional problems that affect their
performance and engagement. They might have taken on too large of a course
load, or might not be getting enough sleep because of work they 're doing
outside of school or be preoccupied in taking care of their family._

I was attempting to only reference apathetic students. They are a subset of
the students who don't do the work required of them. What you write is
certainly true; particularly at community colleges. However, as I tell my
students, for each person it requires x amount of hours (x varies from person
to person) to master the material. If you don't have the time, inclination,
ability, or are otherwise incapable of devoting x hours to the learning the
subject then you won't learn it. Nothing will change this.

If a student can't devote 5 hours a week to a 5 credit course in homework then
they likely won't do well. The reason for their inability is somewhat
irrelevant in the sense that one needs to put in the effort. If you can't you
won't learn the material. Nothing I do can change this fact.

What I can do is to try to make x as small as possible for each person. I try.

~~~
SilasX
>The statements you quoted are about apathetic students. Do you have a cure
for apathy in learning? I don't.

The "cure" is to recognize that you're solving the wrong problem.

Universities originated when there were highly motivated learners, actually
interested in the material and taking an active interest in peppering the
lecturers with questions.

Today, it's de facto purpose is to get a credential and network with useful
people. Learning the material is almost entirely orthogonal to why they're
there, so of _course_ they're doing the minimum to pass (or receive a high
enough grade).

Trying to get the students interested in the material is just digging the hole
deeper. The answer is to stop digging!

Specifically: find a better mechanism by which people can network and signal
their abilities. Leave universities to be attended by people who actually care
about the material and who actually use it as an interactive experience for
which it's best suited.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" find a better mechanism by which people can network and signal their
abilities. Leave universities to be attended by people who actually care about
the material and who actually use it as an interactive experience for which
it's best suited."_

Then you're going to have fewer truly educated people than you could have if
you didn't give up on them. Other societies with much better education systems
than the US show that it is possible to bring more people aboard.

It will take a reform of the education system, but not a reform that caters to
the lucky few who love to learn, but rather one that encourages the love of
learning in more people.

~~~
SilasX
The solution that better countries have is actually pretty similar in spirit
to what I proposed. Germany:

1) Provide valid alternatives to credentialing (e.g. a good trade school
path), so they've drained off demand for university-style credential.

2) Strictly limit who can go by a test, so you don't have people wasting their
time there.

3) Strictly limit how much they can charge, so they don't compete over
providing runaway bloat.

------
gen220
This comment thread echoes experience.

I'm a soon-to-graduate CS student at an institution with an unspendably-large
(in the billions) endowment, and yet the environments in which I've learned
the most at this school, are those in which either (1) other students have
been given the task of teaching me something or (2) vice versa. Notice the
absence of traditional "classroom settings".

Many of my fellow students feel the most lectures we've attended _felt_
futile. It's not that we haven't learned anything from them (quite the
opposite), it's just that it doesn't feel like the most efficient way to
transfer knowledge, given 3 hours and an assembly of Smart People.

Think – in what other time and place will you be able to assemble 30+ great
minds, interested in a specific topic, and one of those minds is (hopefully)
an expert in that topic? It feels like a waste, to assemble this magnitude of
excellence and diversity, just for 1 person to speak for 3 hours. Obviously,
the extreme alternative of chaotic 1-on-1 discussions between isolated friend
groups would also be a waste – but it feels like there ought to be some
goldilocks middle ground.

The lecture environment's shortcomings are mitigated by a highly-engaged and
question-happy audience, but large lecture halls/class sizes, and strict
curriculum requirements dis-incentivize (1) paying attention enough to ask
good questions and (2) answering good questions with detailed and fascinating
tangents.

A classmate recently shared this <
[https://www.recurse.com/](https://www.recurse.com/) > and it continues to
strike me as an enlightened approach to CS education, as it directly leverages
the imperfectly-overlapping distributions of knowledge of the "students" to
further collective education – an idea which makes perfect sense, especially
at the graduate or nearing-end-of-undergraduate levels. Perhaps we'd be better
off running college as a continuous, 4-year Hackathon? :)

------
ericHosick
We used an approach called student centered learning at the University I
lectured at. Basically, students sit in groups and work with each other and
the lecturer acts as an enabler (this is actually harder than just lecturing
for 1+ hours).

But considering we retain 90% of what we teach, I decided to have a team of
students give a lecture. For QA, the team would come into my office and give
me their lecture along with student centered learning tasks they created.

They then lectured in the class. Other students were a lot more attentive and
ask a lot more questions. The students who lectured really knew the material.

In some cases, students would come to my office and ask if they could give
another lecture.

Later, I found out, a few students liked lecturing so much that they became
teachers.

~~~
copperx
> a few students liked lecturing so much that they became teachers.

That's hilarious. Do you count that as a success or a failure of student-
centered learning?

------
jpizza
As someone with a degree in chemistry and now attempting to self-learn CS, I
have found working through detailed books and problems the best way to learn.

If only I would have known this simple fact in my chemistry lectures instead
of trying to look through the book for what the teacher would test on. Yes I
tested well but my understanding of the full concepts is not as expected.

~~~
bo1024
A person who has gone through a degree (of any kind, especially technical) is
in a much better position to self-learn just from working through books and
problems. What works for you now with your knowledge and experience might not
have worked for you as a freshman or sophomore.

------
biotech
There is plenty of research that supports alternative teaching methods. The
problem is, success in these research studies does not always generalize well
to classrooms around the world. There are a few reasons for this, I think.

\- When these methodologies are applied at the college or graduate school
level, you have a bunch of students who are experienced and skilled at
learning in the traditional lecture format. Changing that up in the final
years of their educational career is not always going to be successful.

\- Anecdotally, many teachers report that less motivated students may fall way
behind in alternative teaching methods.

\- Not all teachers are adept at teaching using alternative or "flipped
classroom" methodologies.

\- When students have a bad teacher, the consequences of that are much much
worse in flipped classroom than they are in standard lecture format. A bad
lecturer will usually still get a certain amount of information across, but a
bad flipped classroom facilitator can result in an entire class learning
essentially nothing from a course. So there is significant risk to
implementing alternative classroom methodologies.

------
hprotagonist
The best way i know of to learn is this: you, me, a chalkboard, and about
three hours of arguing in front of it.

this approach doesn’t scale, though.

~~~
practice9
Yeah, the "master & his student" approach is unparalleled in terms of
effectiveness.

~~~
komali2
The only problem is I can think of many specific times in my life where
another student asked a question, and I had the thought, "Fuck, that's a good
question, I didn't even think of that," and I learn down a path that I had
simply applied false assumptions to without realizing it.

------
truculation
A problem I found with lectures was the dilemma: shall I write notes or try to
follow the argument? (I couldn't manage both.)

There was another dilemma: am I here to be inspired or to find out what's
going to be in the exam? (The most inspiring lecturers couldn't care less
about exams.)

~~~
kkylin
The thing I've found most effective (but hard to do in practice because it
takes time): take very minimal notes, just during lecture / seminar, just
enough to remind yourself afterwards what it was about. Try to write more
detailed notes afterwards and make all the logical connections the lecturer
skipped (there are always some, you can't say everything in 50 or 75 minutes).
Then, if there are holes, try to fill them by reading or asking.

But that does take a lot of discipline and effort. It's not easy to do for
every class you're taking, but sometimes worthwhile.

~~~
sp332
In one of my classes - run by the head of the math department - two students
were assigned each day to take notes, "so the rest of the class can pay
attention". He would collect the notes and send copies to the rest of the
class later. The tests were based on material in the notes.

------
Simulacra
_Project-based learning, or designed thinking, doesn’t just help students
“get” the material in time for a good grade on the test; it also helps deepen
their appreciation for what they learn._

The article is a little slanted, IMO, towards tech understanding. My husband
studied polysci. There are not many projects, and hands-on methods for getting
all of that, and I would say that for MOST degrees. Tech, on the other hand,
totally hands on, project based for me.

~~~
didgeoridoo
The humanities have been doing “project-based” learning for a while: essays.
Sure, you’re playing with ideas rather than code, and it’s hard to tell if
your analysis of Rawlsian vs. Nozickian ethics “compiles”, but I’d consider it
project-based learning nonetheless.

~~~
rockostrich
The problem with the comparison is there's no feedback loop with "project-
based" learning unless you can discuss the subjects in a classroom setting or
have 1-on-1 review of what you're writing. A compiler tells you if you're
wrong right away and you can get started on the next feedback cycle
immediately. You know if what you're learning is the working.

------
Jtsummers
Question: When I was an undergrad, almost all the science and engineering
courses involved lectures (to convey information), recitations (to review with
a TA), and usually a lab (sometimes the same as recitations, to practice
material).

Every time I see people saying lectures are outdated, I cannot think of an
actual STEM course where I was _just_ lectured to outside of one Calculus
course (for whatever reason we didn't have recitations for that one, and the
professor was the sort to write and erase at the same time).

Is the problem with courses that are too dependent on lectures (as the
predominant or majority time of faculty/student interaction) or is it actually
that lectures are ineffective?

Even my later CS and math courses that were too small to have a TA had very
interactive "lectures" even if we didn't code or do exercises during them
(very Q&A oriented). Perhaps this is also a difference between different
schools and the faculty at them?

EDIT: Reading more of the comments here I'm realizing that I only had a couple
classes that were "traditional" lecture-oriented courses with the instructor
speaking at us for the hour. The vast majority weren't and I think that's part
of my confusion with the anti-lecture movement that's happening. I consider a
lecture to be a dialog (because that's most of what I experienced) and not a
monologue. I would agree that monologue lectures are boring and dreadful if
that's the majority of what you encounter in a class or school. Now I'm
wondering what schools did that. I went to several universities (spanning the
gamut from lower tier-2 to top of the country) and only at the top school (GA
Tech) did I experience a traditional lecture, and only for a couple courses.

------
dorfsmay
I'm surprised the article nor the comments here mention Harvard professor Eric
Mazur and his "evidence-based, interactive teaching" Peer Instruction method.
This video is a bit long, but goes into details of his scientific approach to
measuring results in the context of learning:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI)

For more details:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_instruction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_instruction)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Mazur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Mazur)

------
bo1024
It's an interesting topic but this article didn't help me learn much about
'the case against lectures'.

Of course there is no one-size-fits-all teaching method. So the questions are
when to use which. My hypothesis is that lectures are better for students who
are well-prepared and well-motivated. If they want to learn the material and
have the background, then give them the material efficiently. But for younger
students with broader backgrounds, lectures aren't as effective. However, it's
easier said than done putting something else in their place.

------
woodandsteel
As a former university teacher of public speaking, let me say that a large
part of the problem is that most lectures are just poor in various ways. A
really good lecture will capture your interest and get the information into
your brain in a way that will make it stick.

