Not all lecturers are the same:
“To excel as a lecturer, it is necessary to find delight as a lecturer. In part, this means ferreting out what is most intriguing about the topic under discussion. It also means attending carefully to learners and seeking and sharing their enthusiasm. A great lecture is not a rote mechanical reading of notes, but a kind of dance, in which lecturer and listeners watch, respond to, and draw energy and inspiration from each other. One of the greatest pleasures of lecturing occurs when learners pose insightful questions that the lecturer did not — perhaps even could not — foresee.” – Richard Gunderman, Is the Lecture Dead?
What makes a lecture work for you? Is it like a dance? What special quality makes your favourite lecturer top of your list?
I saw one person lecture a few times and it was clear how excited they were about the subject. Unfortunately, the excitement was inward and the speaking was almost monotone. The content didn’t matter, the lecturer simply wasn’t giving the audience a way in. The most interested of lecturers aren’t always the most interesting.
Photo by dalbera
A lecturer must find what enthuses the audience and provide an angle they can follow. With a compelling story told well, you have a good start.
Lectures aren’t dead. They’re not dying. But we are growing used to them. They are everywhere, in so many guises. Lectures are offline, online, long, short, bite-sized, basic, advanced, MOOC-based, general, specific… Lectures are talks to an audience. That covers a lot of ground.
New methods of learning and discovering won’t kill off what’s gone before. I’m tired of such a binary, either/or debate. Communication matters, no matter what the angle. Get it right and the communication moves on. The learning continues.
Get stuck and people switch off. There’s no magic answer here.
The lecture is not at fault itself, especially since the term ‘lecture’ is vague. It might be the wrong setting in some cases and there may be better ways to express some concepts. But none of this suggests the end of lectures altogether. That wouldn’t make sense. The point is to have a range of learning resources.
Think of a textbook. When you find the core reading tough to grasp, you can look elsewhere. A similar textbook that’s not on your reading list may have similar information, but be several times easier for you to understand.
I’ve faced that loads of times. A poor book (for me) was replaced by a better book. Imagine if, instead, I got annoyed at books and vowed never to read one again. That would be meaningless.
Once I got a grip of major concepts through a book that spoke to me, I’d return to the core text with more confidence. Sometimes, on the luckiest occasions, I was able to ignore the main text completely.
What has all this got to do with lectures? Well, a good lecture is a good lecture. It’s the bad ones you need to deal with.
When a lecture hasn’t worked out for you, try these things:
- Go over the slides and see if you can recover from those alone;
- Look for similar lectures online. Open Culture is a good starting place with Free Online Courses and Free Online Certificate MOOCs listed;
- Use your core textbooks to read up on terms you didn’t grasp at first;
- When you’re REALLY stuck by one or two concepts, look them up on Simple Wikipedia;
- Speak with your classmates, the lecturer, and online forums. Basically, get a conversation going. It’ll help you see things from other people’s perspectives and it should help your confidence when talking about difficult content.
How do you deal with difficult lectures?
Of course, it’s much better when the lecture and lecturer gel with you. My favourite lecturer at uni did the dance described in the quotation at the top of this post. The energy was there, the content was clear, and much of the audience felt involved. I learned a lot about good presentation at the same time.
Not bad for a simple lecture.
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