Teaching lecture courses online

[Aster]

Any instructor whose courses pre-pandemic were nothing but in-classroom lectures and exams should not be teaching face-to-face or online.

Why do so many people have such odd ideas about lecturing? My lower level courses are mostly lecture based, but that doesn't mean class is just me prattling away at the students. The point of lectures is to give students context and tools through which they can understand the discipline and material. When my classes go well, lecture is participatory. We discuss how the context of the lecture relates to the reading, we talk about how to understand and think through documents and images, students ask questions etc. etc.

None of this is abnormal, everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.

It's not. Countless articles in higher education news, and hundreds of CHE postings on this over the last 12+ years clearly show that lecture based instruction is neither more or less monotype than any other form of instruction.

But sometimes people just refuse to listen, have already made up their mind about something, or would rather parrot the fruity opinions of others rather than think for themselves.

It's just embarrassing when any of those aforementioned individuals are professional educators.

[Bonnie]

everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.

How many classroom observations have you done, Caracal?

How many student complaints have you investigated regarding accusations on that particular point?

How many classes of hundreds or even literally thousands of students have you experienced in any capacity?

People have these views due to personal experience of lectures that are just the sage on the stage with perhaps a few minutes for questions between segments.

People also have these views because narratives of this persist. Not everyone who thinks sage on the stage dominates has experienced sage on the stage. I've observed each of my department TT colleagues teach. Not all are particularly good at the interactive lecture (for a few that is why they asked me to observe) but not a one of them went sage on the stage. Also, not once in my undergraduate or graduate school experience did I have an instructor who was a non-interactive, non-engaging lecturer.

[polly_mer]

Your undergrad experience was different from mine.

Your colleagues are different from mine.

The meme persists because it's not nearly as rare as certain professors would like to think.

It's also not as rare among people who claim not to do it as they like to think.

I still laugh about one particular workshop on interactive classroom techniques that was a fabulous example of how to bore the audience through the driest lecture with exactly zero of the techniques being taught used during the workshop.

[Bonnie]

Your undergrad experience was different from mine.

Your colleagues are different from mine.

The meme persists because it's not nearly as rare as certain professors would like to think.

It's also not as rare among people who claim not to do it as they like to think.

I still laugh about one particular workshop on interactive classroom techniques that was a fabulous example of how to bore the audience through the driest lecture with exactly zero of the techniques being taught used during the workshop.

Yeah. I've been to crappy workshops too. I also open up check-ins with my students they use to vent. They've never vented about sage on the stage. They've vented about load. About assessment techniques. About racism and ableism. But not once about lectures.

So your experience was different than mine. Mine was different than yours. Doesn't make yours or mine clearly more prevalent.

[mleok]

Perhaps I'm naive, but this seems not worth worrying about? I have a hard time imagining the scenario in which anybody is actually going to take all your lectures and use them in another class, and even if they did, who cares? Maybe your online lectures are just better than mine, but I'm pretty confident my head talking above a powerpoint is not something that anybody else is going to really want to steal for their own class.

I teach advanced graduate topics classes, so the content is quite unique and I would like to maintain control over them. As a research mathematics department, we hire postdoctoral researchers/instructors which are paid for using instructional funds, but who contribute towards the research life of the department. We want to ensure that the university does not use their ability to reuse our lectures to reduce their funding of our postdoctoral program.

This concern is sufficiently widespread in my department that we are acquiring local departmental servers where our automatically captured lectures will be stored, so that we can bypass the university level podcasting agreements.

Perhaps this just varies by specialty. The content in all my courses, even the introductory ones, is unique. I'm not in a discipline where there is an established model either in the university, or the department for anything but methods courses, which I don't teach. But, that ends up meaning that it would be very hard to imagine somebody coming in and using my lectures. If you wanted to create a course on the cheap, reusing my lectures wouldn't really help you do that, because to make them function you would have to be teaching the course in the particular way I do.

Maybe this just reflects differences in STEM vs. non-STEM fields.

[spork]

Your undergrad experience was different from mine.

Your colleagues are different from mine.

The meme persists because it's not nearly as rare as certain professors would like to think.

It's also not as rare among people who claim not to do it as they like to think.

I still laugh about one particular workshop on interactive classroom techniques that was a fabulous example of how to bore the audience through the driest lecture with exactly zero of the techniques being taught used during the workshop.

I have seen this on dozens of occasions, with workshops led by people from a variety of different disciplines. I'm now at the stage of my career where I am quite comfortable getting up and leaving the room when this kind of thing happens.

Most people think they are above average, a statistical impossibility.

The vast majority of doctoral programs that supply the faculty members teaching at universities provide little to no formal training in teaching techniques or in the research on learning from psychology/cognitive science.

A lot of students at low- to medium-tier universities prefer sitting in lectures in which there is no interaction with the instructor because they are there to memorize facts during the time they have scheduled for this activity, because their main interest is to be able to repeat those facts on exams to get whatever grade they think they need in the course and move on to the next one.

[marshwiggle]

Perhaps this just varies by specialty. The content in all my courses, even the introductory ones, is unique. I'm not in a discipline where there is an established model either in the university, or the department for anything but methods courses, which I don't teach. But, that ends up meaning that it would be very hard to imagine somebody coming in and using my lectures. If you wanted to create a course on the cheap, reusing my lectures wouldn't really help you do that, because to make them function you would have to be teaching the course in the particular way I do.

Maybe this just reflects differences in STEM vs. non-STEM fields.

I'm sure this is part of it. There's much less room for "discussion" of the chain rule or equations of motion. I've also seen (either here or on the old fora) people suggest 30% of a course grade on "classroom participation". Maybe my experience is rare, but I've never seen a STEM course with ANY of the grade based on "classroom participation".

(A corollary of this is that I have seen instructors from STEM disciplines here say that it doesn't matter if students attend classes as long as they learn the material.)

And I've never heard a STEM faculty member talk about the class "making knowledge together" in the class, which I have heard from other disciplines.

[FishProf]

In field courses, participation is not an uncommon component to the grade.  In my classes, when it takes the effort of most of the class to do the field work, participation is essential.

[Caracal]

everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.

How many classroom observations have you done, Caracal?

How many student complaints have you investigated regarding accusations on that particular point?

How many classes of hundreds or even literally thousands of students have you experienced in any capacity?

People have these views due to personal experience of lectures that are just the sage on the stage with perhaps a few minutes for questions between segments.

Well, obviously I'm speaking from my experience, which as I made clear, is based mostly on my discipline and related disciplines and what friends and colleagues do. I've never been in a position where I deal with student complaints. I've certainly done class observations, although I should do more.

As for experience with classes of hundreds, I've taught only one, although I have more experience with them in other capacities. As an undergrad, I took a couple. I also took a few classes that were smaller, but didn't really feature much interaction between the instructor and students, unless you wanted to ask a question at the end. I was also a TA in a really big class or two. Of those handful of courses, a couple were really great, one was really bad and the others were somewhere in the middle. I'm certainly not very good at it, the one time I taught a big class I thought that the same methods of engagement I use with fifty person classes would work and they really didn't. I've just never understood the belief that certain teaching methods are inherently bad. Some teachers are bad at teaching in certain ways. I certainly am not very good at formats that require me to lecture without any student participation. Some people are very good at it. I'm sure there are some really horrible flipped classrooms out there too. The point I was making at the beginning was that, at least in my discipline, there really aren't many people who actually just stand up there and talk anymore. Most of those people have retired. I don't really think we've all moved away from that model because it was bad, it just reflects changing styles and cultures of teaching.

Also this rhetorical device you keep using of questioning ther people's qualifications to weigh in is getting boring. Your basic assumption is that only people who have your experiences should get to say anything. Unfortunately, it is often obvious that your own perspectives often were pretty narrow. I don't doubt you heard more complaints from students about professors droning on at the front of the room. Probably some of these instructors were bad at lecturing, but students complain about the the things they think administrators will listen to. You're much more likely to hear that the instructor just talked all the time than "he made us split into groups and do stuff all the time," not because those classes were always better, but because students didn't know how to articulate what they found wrong with the other approach.

[Caracal]

A lot of students at low- to medium-tier universities prefer sitting in lectures in which there is no interaction with the instructor because they are there to memorize facts during the time they have scheduled for this activity, because their main interest is to be able to repeat those facts on exams to get whatever grade they think they need in the course and move on to the next one.

You know, I often hear this, but it doesn't really match either my experience as a student or an instructor. Overwhelmingly, the students I've had who dislike lecture formats the most tend to be weaker students. They complain because they want to memorize facts and don't like that they are being asked to think about how concepts fit together, or how ideas developed. They get frustrated because they want these very simple narratives where one thing leads to another and when their instructor is telling them about some weird thing as an example of how people tried to make sense of the world, they just get confused because they have a hard time holding more than one idea in place at a time.

[mamselle]

As Piaget might suggest, they haven't matured into hypothetical-deductive thinking yet.

Some "get it" early--as early as 5 or 6, although the usual age is/was said to be 8-12.

For others, it takes decades.

Still others never do.

M.

[the_geneticist]

Any instructor whose courses pre-pandemic were nothing but in-classroom lectures and exams should not be teaching face-to-face or online.

Most of the instructors in my department do exactly this.  Some throw in a few clicker questions.
It's embarrassing and dreadful.