The traditional class period lasts about an hour, so many professors design their lectures to be that long, too. But professors who record their lectures for the Web find that students prefer short segments to class-length talks. A free article in this week’s Chronicle describes how some professors are experimenting with short-form lectures in their classrooms as well as online. But some long-time professors worry that cutting up lectures into short pieces will lead to oversimplification.
Diane Zorn (above), an instructor at York U., in Toronto, films what she calls a “minilecture” in a campus studio. (Photograph by Rick Chard)
12 Responses to Why Do Lectures Have to Be One Hour?
sciencegrad - January 30, 2012 at 1:13 pm
I’m not an instructor, but I’ll give my two cents as a student.
When I look back at the courses I had in undergrad, the courses in which I felt that I mastered the material the best were the courses that eschewed the traditional lecture format. Not surprising. Unfortunately, I only had three such courses. I’ll explain what made each of them so great.
1. My Circuits 1 course used a peer instruction method nearly identical to the example you provide in the link in your blog post. Each lecture started with a single clicker question based on material from the previous lecture. This served a couple purposes: it checked attendance as it was worth some credit, it woke us up a bit at 8 in the morning, and it gave us all a chance to explain our understanding of the previous course material to our peers and occasionally argue our answer before the entire class. This was immensely useful because it would instantly destroy incorrect notions of the material while strengthening the accurate ones.
2. A software project management course used a project-based learning approach. We broke up into groups of 2-3 students the first day of class and spend nearly the entire semester working on a single software project. During class, we listened to traditional lectures, but were expected to use the management techniques we were learning in our projects as homework. In addition to weekly progress reports sent to the professor, we had two or three technical review presentations throughout the semester. Project-based learning was great for this class because it can be difficult to convince people that certain project management techniques are actually useful unless they try it themselves. And I know first hand that it can be nearly impossible to get people to try to implement these techniques unless they are forced to do so.
3. Lastly, my Quantum Mechanics class gave students the ability to choose some of the material to be taught and we were assigned an essay on any QM-related topic of our choice. The instructor had clearly defined concepts that were taught in the semester, but we were allowed to propose ideas and vote on specific applications to cover in more detail. Since the instructor focused so heavily on the conceptual and philosophical nature of QM, most of the students seemed very interested in how such a fascinating and confusing branch of science can be applied. This excitement was clearly demonstrated in our essays as it seemed like the paper was the only academic topic people talked about that week.
Unfortunately, all of my graduate classes so far have been the traditional lecture format without even a single project. Hopefully this will not always be the case.
Robert Talbert - January 30, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Your last comment is especially interesting. My graduate courses were largely like this too. It seems rare to hear of graduate courses in the traditional disciplines that aren’t lecture-oriented. Why? You would think that graduate courses would be wholly focused on getting students to do Master’s and PhD research, and they have an audience that is considerably more capable of handling independent work than the average undergrad course.
I should add that the two notable exceptions to this rule for me were a graduate differential geometry course where we did exploratory learning using Mathematica, and a project in my graduate algebra class where we had to write a computer program to find the characteristic of a ring. I remember those like they were yesterday, but the lecture stuff has long since sloughed off.
philosophy - January 30, 2012 at 5:40 pm
From my interdisciplinary humanities course: for a reading assignment, students are given one or more questions (which I hope are at least a bit challenging) about the reading, and have to bring to class printed responses to the questions – one, or at most two pages. In class they divide into groups of 3-5 to compare and discuss their responses. After a while each group reports to the whole class about their agreements, disagreements, interpretations, etc. This usually gives me entrees for comments, clarifications, other interpretations, etc. presented to the whole class, and sometimes a lively whole-class discussion.
sciencegrad - January 30, 2012 at 9:12 pm
I had a few history classes by a professor who had something similar to this in the class, except for one key difference that you may be interested in trying. For each reading assignment, there were 4-6 group leaders such that during the discussions, there would be a single group leader per group. Every student had to be a group leader once during the semester. The group leaders were responsible for doing the reading a few days ahead of time and meeting on their own to discuss the readings and to formulate the discussion questions. These were then emailed to the professor a couple days before discussion so the professor could review them and send them back for changes if needed. This method added an additional feeling of ownership of the material.
missoularedhead - January 31, 2012 at 9:31 am
One way to get students to own their learning is to ask them to find class materials. Sounds odd, perhaps, but after years of finding interesting primary sources, spending hours combing the interwebs, I simply stepped back, and asked the students to find them, instead. Some of their choices would not have been mine, perhaps, and not all of their sources were particularly relevant, but they all found things, and some students tried to top each other by finding more obscure documents related to the topics at hand (one student found sources I had NO idea were digitized). Less work for me, more investment for them…pretty much a win-win!
v8573254 - January 31, 2012 at 10:20 am
Such a succinct, unpreach-y essay. Thank you.
pm9531 - February 4, 2012 at 9:46 am
The STEM world has close to a 20% drop/fail/grade=D, at least this is my working unvalidated assumption. We are told math and science is just plain harder than other subjects. Given many students learn early to avoid STEM classes it seems there is a problem with the preparation of those brave souls who dare to study it. College A goes through an elaborate selection process then finds 20% of its students unable to meet basic level competency in the math and sciences. I took calculus as an adult at night school and got the friendly C grade but understood only bits and pieces. My son takes high school pre-calculus now and looking over his book I am reminded of a convoluted cook book with wild recipes requiring ingredients available only from a boutique spice shop somewhere in the south of Italy. Oh, just wait until you get into Calculus, then you will really need this stuff his teacher assures him. One problem with this waiting game, he is looking at colleges now and finds the no math requirement an especially enticing benefit for prospective colleges to offer.
How about Mathematica, Microsoft, Apple, The Government or somebody, design an video game that those self-selecting out of STEM might use? The notion of owning your education rings true but for many the last thing they want to do is rent or own anything to do with Calculus. In our system we call it aptitude, in China they call it hard work but in both who really uses it after getting certified for whatever job requires this arcane knowledge? Just asking, I really have no clue.
tenured_radical - February 4, 2012 at 9:40 pm
I love this post — thanks.
Robert Talbert - February 5, 2012 at 7:23 am
Thanks, and thanks for stopping by. It’s nice to hear from my blog network “neighbors”.
Robert Talbert - February 5, 2012 at 7:26 am
I think this post addresses your question: http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/11/08/is-math-too-hard-or-just-not-interesting-enough/
Short version: Students are more than willing to work through the difficulties of courses in the STEM disciplines as long as (a) there’s a believable payoff in the end and (b) it holds their attention. I think we instructors can do more in both of these areas, and if we do, I think we’ll see greater “ownership”.
johnmeier1 - February 9, 2012 at 9:50 am
There is a group of videos and practice exercises online at the Khan Academy for pre-calculus http://www.khanacademy.org/#precalculus It is not exactly a video game, but you can save progress and earn points.
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