At 10:42 AM +1000 29/9/13, Tom Worthington wrote: >I would prefer if the certification was available with the >on-line/flexible courses, avoiding old fashioned "Lecture 1.0". I never >enjoyed attending lectures and gave up giving lectures, around the time >I was appointed a "Lecturer" at ANU: >http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Lecture_2.0
Lectures have their place in teaching-and-learning. But I very much agree with the proposition that they should have long ago ceased to be the centrepiece of university education. Anecdote: in late 1994, I proposed to the ANU Dean of Commerce that I would reduce lectures from 13 wks x 2 hrs to c. 6-10 x 1 hr, and invest the time in a mix of workshops, and visual and interactive teaching materials using this newgfangled web-thingie, to complement the exising 12wks x 1 hr of tutorials. He threatened me with the intellectual equivalent of castration. Okay, he was a thorough twerp and a nasty piece of work; but his shall-we-say caution reflects the views of the time. Is it all that much better now? Where I think lectures help is in assisting candidates to break into a new topic-area, or a new school of thought. A lot of students also appreciate a wrap-up lecture at the end of a unit, and sometimes even at the end of a logical block within a unit. Recorded lectures can work well for a particularly hard-to-grasp topic. You can more easily 'get yourself up' to do a good lecture on a particular topic once; whereas repeating a good performance year after year, and even semester after semester, is near-impossible. [Underlying philosophy: you can't hurt the top 10-20%; you can't *help* the bottom 10-20%; you can make a difference for the middle 60-80%.] Declaration: Like Tom, and probably a lot of us on this list, and indeed the average student in 1967 and 2017 alike, I attended a small percentage of lectures in most subjects - but there were exceptions, to some extent for individual lecturers, and where I really could not work out what the heck the subject was supposed to be about. Corners of math stats, the strange legal notion of equity, international trade theory, ... Qualification: My comments relate to the disciplines I've been involved with - info sys, comp sci, accountancy, law, economics. It may be different in divinity, history, etc. -- Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/ Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 6288 6916 http://about.me/roger.clarke mailto:[email protected] http://www.xamax.com.au/ Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of N.S.W. Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
