Thanks for the Lecture
As of yesterday it’s officially fall, and even though I’m no longer in school, I think this season will always feel like the beginning of the year to me. One thing keeping that feeling alive (besides this and this) is that I’m part of a team at NogginLabs that’s currently developing an online master’s program for a large Midwestern university.
Online programs like this are still somewhat new in higher education, and a lot of its practitioners are still working out the best way to approach them. My team has put considerable effort into one particular approach: turning what would normally be classroom lectures into interactive, online activities that learners can complete at their own pace and convenience. Instructors are involved in the creation of these online activities, but aren’t expected to continue lecturing on that content over and over every term, since students in class after class can access the same multimedia file and receive the same information.
As I work on this project, it’s difficult not to recall the lectures I sat through during my experience at another large Midwestern university. One stands out as particularly memorable, although perhaps not for the right reasons.
The college I went to is one of those really big ones: the kind with auditorium-style classrooms that seat 300 students at a time. How it feels to be the instructor standing at the front of that kind of audience I can hardly imagine, but I do know how it feels to be a student lost in a sea of 299 other undergraduates, none of whom got enough sleep the night before. In a class that size, it’s easy to blend in and hard to pay attention. It wasn’t exactly shocking to see students nodding off in droves, and I’ll admit that, once or twice, I was one of those students.
During one class in particular, the instructor stopped talking mid-sentence, looked me straight in the eye, reached behind her lectern, and pulled out a handful of dinner rolls, which she proceeded to hurl in my direction. I had drifted off, of course. My dream ended as seamlessly as it had begun, and when I opened my eyes and saw that there were, in fact, no rolls, buns, or dinner breads of any kind gathered on the floor by my chair, I was extremely confused. Now: without getting into whose fault it was that I fell asleep in the first place, will it surprise you to know that this is my most vivid memory from the entire course? If pressed, I might be able to think of which department the course was in, but no more details on the subject come to mind.
Of course, not every lecture I attended during college induced hallucinatory dreams (she wasn’t just throwing food—she was looking right at me! My instructor! Unheard of!), but I do think this story nicely illustrates how transforming lectures into online activities can eliminate some of a lecture-based course’s negatives without necessarily sacrificing the positives (lectures do, in fact, usually contain information students need to know). This way, instructors can spend more of their time providing individual feedback and facilitating discussion between the students and less time repeating themselves, providing more opportunity for participation than students would normally get in a lecture-based course. Of course, there are good and bad ways to deliver feedback and facilitate discussion in an online environment, but that’s a topic for another post.
What we haven’t yet been able to do is find a good way of digitizing dinner rolls, but I have faith that technology will get us there in the end.
Maria Parrott
Content Producer
NogginLabs, Inc.
