Teach, Play, Sing

What’s one practical thing you would do to improve lecture courses?

gjmueller:

world-shaker asks for your advice:

Let’s assume:

• Large course with at least 100 students
• Primarily taught via lecture
• Stadium-style seating
• College-level course
• And you can offer more than one idea

Let go of the powerpoint. Please. I know powerpoint is a handy way of organizing information… but I see too many lecture classes where they either (1) read right from the powerpoint or (2) fill the slides with important information but then say just as many different important thing while they speak. The first leaves me mindlessly bored, and the second is incredibly frustrating because I can only take notes on one or the other. 

*If* you’re going to use powerpoint, these would be my suggestions:

• Be succinct with what you put on it. It shouldn’t be a wordy mess. Tight bullet points that you elaborate on would work best.
• Don’t be a afraid to step away from the powerpoint. In fact, I encourage it. Be creative. Find other ways to demonstrate things. A text summary of how the phases of the moon work is fine and dandy. Actually standing in the middle of the room while a student walks around you, visually demonstrating, is even better.
• Along those lines, don’t forget the basics you learn in education classes. The more ways you have to present information, the better (Universal Design, anyone?). There are multiple learning styles out there, and while I’ve heard research that goes both ways on left brained/right brained and visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning (seriously, do these exist? some of my professors swear by it, others try to debunk it…) I think it’s good to have multiple ways of presenting information/ways students can learn information just to drive the point home in creative ways.
• Examine your end learning goals for the class. What do you want students to take away? What concepts do you want them to understand? What skills/knowledge are actually important enough that they should readily understand them (especially important in the age of Google… you’ll have a much harder time convincing students they need to know the names of Greek astronomers when Petrachus is just a quick Wikipedia search away). This leads directly to…
• Once you understand your learning goals, figure out meaningful ways to assess them. That may still be the online, multiple choice test. It’s quick and effective. But sometimes that may not be the case. Don’t be afraid to step outside the box. Honestly, I would rather attend a class that at least had clear goals and objectives in mind with meaningful ways for me to demonstrate I’ve achieved/acquired/etc I’ve reached those goals than a lecture that hurtles information at me that is supposedly important and then randomly selects questions for a 30 question test twice a week.

To wrap this up, I’ll just say this - students typically come into a large lecture class either unmotivated to learn (“Sigh one last gen ed class and then I’ll never take a random science course again…”) or as a means of getting to the next level (“If I make it through this Chem 101 lecture maybe I’ll get to the interesting stuff!”). I hate to say it, but there aren’t many cases where I’ve seen students excited to be in a large lecture class. Which is why it’s more important to understand meaningful ways for students to learn and to have a meaningful curriculum and assessment process. You’re trying to get them to care. And showing that you’ve actually taken the time to create an interesting course (rather than relying on the information to be interesting for its own sake) will go a long way. You can’t win them all, but there’s no reason you should lose them all as well.

[edit: I guess this post kind of evolved from “fix powerpoint” to “reform your entire course.” Only noticed that in retrospect :P]