Death of The Lecture - Sixty Symbols

this is not because i don't enjoy lecturing i love lecturing and i get a great deal out of the experience and i see my role in lecturing to enthuse students but in terms of active learning just sitting there for 50 minutes for one thing why 50 minutes why why do we stuff people in here for an hour or you know 50 minutes to an hour why that quantum of time all right professor where are you standing at the moment where are we i'm standing in the largest lecture theater in the physics building and actually one of the largest lecture theaters at the university of nottingham what we're going to talk about today is the death of the lecture we're in the midst of a pandemic and higher education and lecturing is going to be changed or is in the process of being changed dramatically there's a wonderful quote from virginia woolf university lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the middle ages when books were scarce to swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer do you agree with that i do i agree entirely with that are lectures dead should they be dead no definitely not i guess it's been given a particular currency because of lockdown and the fact that we haven't actually been able to give lectures and the fact that we actually finished up our teaching for this academic year online but actually the discussion's been going on a lot longer than that and what's really precipitated it was the prevalence of lecture capture the fact that lecture capture is happening that we're basically videoing and recording all our lectures are making them available to students and so then the obvious question you ask is well what was the point in being at the lecture you know why don't i just listen to the lecture capture and certainly my view is that they are not in any way interchangeable i think it is ridiculous that a process whereby we just stuff students into our lecture theater and talk at them we've been doing that for centuries and it's really easy it's really easy for a lecturer just to stand up here and talk particularly if all you're doing is effectively taking notes from a book firing them out and expecting the the students to absorb that by osmosis how do you really deeply learn something do you sit and just watch somebody talk at you and listen to it or do you actively engage with it so for example at the moment what i'm trying to do is use is try to do something called triplets on drums which is basically da da da da da da just three drums in a row now i can watch as many videos as i like explaining this is how you do triplets or what a triplet is i'm not going to get any further in terms of engaging with that material or any musical instrument anything you can think of in terms of how do you learn to play an instrument you practice you engage with the material and you do something active so you burn it into your neurons that's not what's happening in a lecture if you go to elect you know if it's a nine o'clock lecture you've made a particular effort to be there you've kind of you know committed to going there you're sitting there for an hour there are no other distractions you're surrounded by a whole bunch of other students who are all focused on what's going on in the lecture so i actually you know it really kind of is going to be a completely different experience from watching a youtube video while you're doing three other things at the same time making yourself a cheese toasty and chatting to your mates you talk about the fact that students at a lecture pay attention more do they pay attention though are they just turning up because they have to be ticked off a list i i mean they don't have to be there right and you know nothing bad happens to them if they don't turn up i mean we'll ask why they weren't there but actually you know we don't kick them out of the university or anything like that it really is you know you just want a little bit of pressure to get people to go to the lecture then they bother to attend and they get all the benefits that come from actually being in the lecture there's a wonderful lecture in harvard a physicist called eric missouri he's got this wonderful quote which is the traditional lecture involves transferring the notes from the notebook of the lecturer to the notebooks of the students without going through the brains of either and that might be overstating the case a little bit but it's not overstating the case a lot and again i see my role really about enthusiasm it's about getting the students to say well this is interesting what you know this is a really interesting subject i want to find out more about this i want to do the coursework because the subject is interesting i want to understand this more but the intellectual heavy lifting doesn't come from me or shouldn't come from me it comes from the students and that's not what's happening in this type of environment it's really important when you're learning that there's a reasonable amount of structure imposed on what you're doing that you're learning things in the right order that you're learning them from the right resources in a consistent way that everything sort of fits together with everything else and the nice thing about the structure of a lecture is that that's sort of built into it right that actually the lecture has all that has that flow to it it's sort of done in a very sort of consistent way whereas if you're just dipping into you know this resource and that resource it's very hard to get that kind of structured learning which is an important part of the the learning process making sure that students focus within this environment and that there's something to get you know i've got a nine o'clock lecture i'll get up for it i won't get offered but at least the structure there that is important but to me it seems like a real cop-out to say that well all we're doing is structuring the material we can do so much more with that 50 minutes rather than just have the traditional lecture we have some levels of interaction you know we have we give the students these little clickers that allow them to answer questions during the course of the lecture so there is sort of even in a large lecture with 200 students in it i am getting that feedback did that thing i just explained go across right or have i failed to explain it miserably in which case they're not going to be able to answer this simple you know multiple choice question i've just asked them so there are lots of places where there is interaction even in the conventional lecture so the lecture in its current format i would say we really do anything to need to think about the death of that but of course we're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water so what we will do and i think it's sort of obvious the grand term that's being used is chunking which seems really strange because you've been chunking for years brady you've been breaking material up into five and ten minute videos that's what we should do short 5 10 minutes 60 symbols like videos on a particular topic accompanied with um for example a simulation a piece of javascript or whatever that that codes some of that with parameters and that can be adjusted and changed so that students can effectively do a numerical experiment and say well if he's talking about this about just these sliders what happens and that interactivity is important again in terms of getting the concepts and then we use the lecture slots whatever lecture slots we have is available as problems classes and as discussion groups and i'll set up some here are some problems and what we're going to do is we're going to discuss those problems now you could say well what if the students don't do the problems well what we do is we have some credit associated we have some marks associated with the coursework to encourage them gently to do the work and to engage with the work that's what i'd like there is this thing called the flipped classroom which is the idea is that basically in the classroom instead of the lecturer standing up and teaching things the students have pre-read a bunch of stuff and then basically you get them to solve problems in the class you get them to interact with you to interact with each other and get much more of a dialogue going it's a nice idea in principle it clearly works to a degree but actually there is interesting evidence that suggests it's not quite the golden bullet that some people have been arguing that it is there was a test done last year by some researchers at mit where they did the controlled experiment of some people being taught in a flipped classroom way some people were being taught in a conventional way they found that the overall attainment was about the same in both groups but actually the flipped classroom group the spread of attainment was much bigger in that the better students really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it and did better but the weaker students really struggled with it and for example students from minority groups found it very hard and in retrospect i think there are kind of obvious reasons for that right that actually you would expect that if you're a slightly disenfranchised group if you come up with a way of teaching that really requires you to interact effectively with the other students then you're going to find it harder to do if you're they're not your natural social peer group that you've been interacting with anyway so i think you know part of the argument against the traditional lecture is that there are newer better ways of doing it i would just caution that those newer better ways sometimes have some some shortcomings of their own this comes home to me i've had tutorial groups what's absolutely clear that one of the students in that group is absolutely uncomfortable with being in that small group and being sort of on the edge of their seat maybe i'm going to get asked a question and i don't know this and what are the others going to think of me so what we have to do is just recognize that there are different ways of learning other students for example in a tutorial group are rushing to the board to do things but some aren't so we have to have a blended approach to learning it's sort of obvious in some ways but again just stuffing lots of people in here and talking at them is not the way to do it i've heard you're a good lecturer do you not do you not think they've added something unique to people's university experience into their education sitting in your lectures if i've enthused people yes but i want them to come away from this not going well i listen to that that was amazing i've learned a lot i want them to come away with it going i've listened to that that was really amazing and interesting and you know he was very enthusiastic about it i want to learn more that's the key thing and lecture is exciting depends on the lecturer it's interesting right some of my colleagues you know sometimes they end up with what looked like deadly dull subjects to lecture but they find exciting ways to present them others sometimes look like they've got the most exciting optional thing that will you know tell people about cutting-edge research in some area or other and they managed to sound it make it sound deadly dull so it is a bit varied i just don't think you improve that situation dramatically by just changing the medium you're using for teaching phil i know that you really love music uh your best music experience the times when you've listened to songs at home on your own chunks of music and things like that or have that has it been when you've been at concerts with thousands of other people seeing them in the flesh brilliant absolutely brilliant point brady yes that collective communal experience whatever is very very important and that interaction between the students is very important i am not suggesting that we get rid of that i'm suggesting that what we do is we amplify that get them talking to each other during the the lectures get them arguing with me it's a final year module i do called the politics perception and philosophy of physics which i think i've mentioned before the first time i did that because it's quite different it's more like a humanity set up in that there are seminars and discussion groups so i'll talk for 20 minutes and then open up the floor i expected it to be tumbleweight these are physicists after all what traditional physics courses you just talk at them but the floodgates opened and they debated and they discussed and they argued in a friendly way and sometimes yeah no usually in a friendly way and they argued with me as well and that's what i want that's what should happen that's so much better than me statically sort of giving that that information out what do you say to someone who says well mike's the head of school at a university physics department of course he's going to advocate for something that you know you can only get at a university um is that true statement i guess that is a true statement i mean it's true to an extent and there are people who are perfectly you know autodidact's who can go out and really learn these things on their own i think probably the learning process intrinsically requires somebody to be guiding you through it and whether that guidance comes from a lecturer standing at the front of a lecture theater or a tutor you're chatting with about your problems trying to to understand a particular area of the subject you know there will be different ways that guidance is given the lecture is just one of the ways that guidance is given education is difficult lecturing is easy some will disagree but that's certainly my perspective on this i'm sure i hope this will generate some debate down there i hope the comments section will light up but i would argue that lecturing is easy education is difficult for example we lecturers have a much easier job than secondary school teachers high school teachers much easier job what about the heritage einstein gave lectures this is a wonderful thing that's happened for so many years and now you want to have zoom calls and quizzes einstein didn't have an iphone so einstein didn't um communicate with people on the other side of the world almost instantaneously einstein lived in a different world and the physicists who einstein was teaching and the physicists that who were interacting with einstein it was a very different time and the skills that you needed then are very different from the skills you need today having made the case for lectures and talking about how valuable you think they are to education we're recording this during a pandemic where it looks like you're not going to be able to give them for who knows how long how catastrophic is that the process has been non-stop in that we moved all of our teaching very rapidly online in a very ad hoc fashion when it all started we then got into assessment how do we do exams we figured out ways of doing that we've just completed the assessment we've just been returning the students their marks the next thing on the list is okay so that's done now how do we teach it better next year so we're already i was in a skype meeting yesterday where we were discussing new methods for teaching what technology we're going to use what approaches we're going to use how we're going to split things up into smaller pieces how we're going to ensure that there are you know q and a sessions with lecturers and ways for them to engage with the lecturer we're only working our way through that now hopefully you know this is not the long term where we're going to be forever and so we're trying to develop things in a way that's sort of blended that allows us to combine face-to-face things with online things so that we can shift the balance as times allow but we're really just feeling our way through it at the moment would anything be lost by the death of the lecture no i don't think in the death of the traditional lecture format no i do i don't think we will have the same elements um we will have the ability to have a lecturer who's there is hopefully engaging is hopefully explaining the material but in a much more interactive way in terms of being led by the students rather than just going well i'll prepare my lecture notes the night before and just dump them at the students who's going to win this we're already seeing some universities saying oh we're going to go online next year and things like that are you going to end up being right here i think that in terms of how we modify the lectures yes i would say it's not just i've got to point out it's not just me there are many other people who think along these lines i think yes we're going to see a change and i think the important thing is is stuff that would have you know two years ago would have said if i want to do things this way the argument would have been well just we don't have the resources to do that there's no way we can do that it's really interesting how this pandemic has focused the mind and things that would have previously been absolutely beyond the pale suddenly are within reach with this current pandemic i think coming out the other side of it enduring it we've got an opportunity really to radically change things and i would be so disappointed if we come out the other side of this and all that happens is well i got a slightly higher resolution camera to fill my traditional lectures that would be so disappointing if you'd like to see both of the full-length interviews that went into this video i'm going to put the links on the screen and down in the video description i also think there's like a little bit of star power in a strange way to being taught in person by a person who does the thing and knows the stuff even if it's a lowly astronomer being talked being taught astronomy by someone who's been there and done it and done real astronomy and written papers and used the big telescopes has like a kind of a a star quality if you excuse the pun and also it means that you know when they come up with questions at the end that weren't on the syllabus hopefully it means the lecturer can actually answer them because you know they actually know the subject they don't just know the thing that they're teaching they don't just know the syllabus they're teaching they actually know the subject around it you can see plenty more videos too with mike and phil both on 60 symbols and deep sky videos i'm going to include links to those as well

Channel: Sixty Symbols

Views: 181,925

Keywords: sixtysymbols, lecture, university, lectures, teaching

Id: vv1134PLylU

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/WristbandYang]

The BenBenandBlue podcast (by 3blue1brown and Ben Eater) expands on some of the arguments from this video concerning university education (especially Ep.2).

[u/ArghNoNo]

Phil Moriarty is great at teaching, and he is a man of science, so it is a bit of a disappointment to see him relying on anecdotes and personal feelings to evaluate the different teaching techniques. It is strange that he doesn't appear to realize the debate is about factual claims that can be - and have been - tested scientifically.

[u/[deleted]]

It appears that Brady’s experience might become valuable to the Nottingham university in a more direct way ! Time to teach the teachers about chunkification.

Whatever comes out of this (I think this debate is widespread over all teaching institutions), I am inclined to think that the result will be a net improvement in knowledge accessibility. Available online resources often lack the mentioned structure that lecturers can bring.

[u/shivii23]

As a prospective uni student, this was a great and very insightful video. Thanks Brady!

[u/Desmaad]

Lecturing strikes me as a leftover from when books were still all hand-copied and therefore scarce.

[u/Voyager87]

Funny how the lecture from the guy in the lecture theatre who opposed lectures carried more impact.

[u/QuantumKaffe]

I think there is a role to play for lectures in academia, especially for introducing new concepts. In my opinion, people who argue otherwise act as if a university courses now a days only have lectures, whereas typically lectures only comprise 3 out of the 13 hours per week students are expected to work on the subject. The latter 10 hours should include the very useful active learning group sessions and trying to solve problems in groups and individually.