LECTURES & LECTURE NOTES

Our students attend classes (more or less), take notes (more or less), read their recommended textbooks (more or less), go to laboratory classes, do their exercises, write their laboratory reports, work through their assignments, do their tests, pass their examinations and they are educated. Or so we hope! The student body is not uniform and the learning styles, study habits and modes of acquisition of knowledge vary widely. Hence the spread of marks at the end of semester when we have finished assessing a particular subject, even if all of our students have theoretically received the same “education”.

The sensitive educator provides a banquet of teaching from which each student can partake a (hopefully) nutritious meal of learning. Who is to tell us as educators what brain foods we are to provide at our banquet such that the dishes there are not only appealing but also highly nutritious? Humour my analogy a little further… In amongst the tasty morsels that look wonderful and taste delicious, enticing one to eat them, we must include the basic nutrients for a healthy diet, while eschewing the harmful junk.

The situation is complicated nowadays with all of the learning resources that are available. The humble textbook is still around, but has been supplemented by eBooks, internet resources, more sophisticated classroom presentations, manuals, CDs, DVDs, laboratory and clinic exercises that incorporate virtual experiments and patients. A formidable menu of choices for the educator, who may well be overwhelmed by its wide variety.
 

And yet, how often is it that we hear from the students: “What do I need to know to pass the exam?” or “Are my lecture notes enough to pass?” or “Give me a list of things to study for the exam.” Learning may well be driven by fear of the final assessment. The lecture is still seen by students as the primary way in which deliver information to them that is the most relevant for the learning outcomes we set for them at the beginning of the class. Academics at university are still wedded to the “lecture” as the be all and end all of teaching. The lecture, which unfortunately in many ways has not changed for hundreds of years.

It is not unusual therefore that lecture notes become the primary source of material for pre-exam revision. A student may know how to take good lecture notes, but more often than not, good note-taking skills are very rare. No wonder students often demand lecture notes from their instructor. For me personally, this has never worked. I need to take my own notes, even if I am provided with full notes (no doubt this is the case with many other people). However, I appreciate that others require notes as provided by the lecturer, which they rubricate, highlight, and expand, thus using them effectively as learning tools. Still others, will take the lecture notes provided and sit back in the lecture passively listening (at best), not even bothering to jot down a point that the lecturer is making that is not on the notes. Others still (hopefully a small minority) will rely on the notes given and not even turn up to the lecture, however engaging this may be and whatever extra information the lecturer may add to the presentation that is not included in the notes...

How do we deal with this issue of learning materials? What do we provide and what do we not? I full well realise that different subjects may have different needs and requirements, but do we set minimum requirements by which all of our teachers have to abide? Do we set a maximum ceiling? (We do not want to spoon-feed, do we? These are tertiary students we teach!). What about the quality of the material? Copyright issues? What about the textbook? Or even, the dreaded PowerPoint slide printouts that lecturers are often guilty of reading from, verbatim?

“Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes, in the nature of the case, different points of view.” Robert Hutchins (1899 – 1977)

What do you think? How do we engage students in this dialogue?

(The illustration is from a fourteenth-century manuscript and shows Henry of Germany delivering a lecture to university students in Bologna.  Artist: Laurentius de Voltolina; "Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Alemannia"; Kupferstichkabinett SMPK, Berlin/Staatliche Museen Preussiischer Kulturbesitz, Min. 1233)