How Can I Create More Effective Mini-Lectures?

Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99

Active learning brings many benefits to the college classroom, but no matter how much emphasis your curriculum places on engaging students, sometimes you still have to disseminate information. Learn how to deliver effective mini-lectures that resonate with your students in How Can I Create More Effective Mini-Lectures?, a Magna 20 Minute Mentor.

Based on research in cognitive and educational psychology, and integrating best practices from business and teaching theories, this fast and focused session offers you the insights you need to upgrade your teaching and the practical guidance to help you get started.

You’ll learn proven techniques you can use immediately to transform your lectures from necessary evils to persuasive presentations. Drawing on her extensive classroom and faculty development experience, presenter Christy Price, Ed.D., an award-winning educator from Dalton State College, demonstrates how educating and motivating students gets easier when you develop mini-lectures that are based on how the brain works. She’ll also show you how to help students retain what you teach through:

• Guided practice
• “Zen presentations”
• Relevant course content
• Embedded classroom assessment techniques
• Positive experiences for student learners

The human brain is, by nature, a novelty seeker. In this session you’ll discover how to stop fighting the brain’s natural tendencies and, instead, put them to work engaging students. Price’s tips are so practical you’ll be able to use them in your next class session.

With its balanced blend of theory and practice, How Can I Create More Effective Mini-Lectures? shows you the whys and hows of developing an effective presentation. You’ll learn:

• Techniques to facilitate student memory processing through lecture notes
• The optimal time length for a mini-lecture
• Design elements you should and shouldn’t use in classroom presentations
• The key ingredients of a Zen presentation
• Practices great communicators use to connect with audiences
• Content and stylistic guidelines to make sure your mini-lectures are engaging students

Understanding the best ways to deliver an effective presentation — capable of engaging students and communicating essential course content — will help you and your students achieve learning goals.

Magna 20 Minute Mentors are developed by and for busy faculty who are committed to the pursuit of excellence in higher education. This session focuses on the needs of classroom faculty.

Price’s engaging speaking style, combined with her detailed recommendations of additional resources, make How Can I Create More Effective Mini-Lectures? an ideal program for mid-career higher education professionals as well as new instructors. You also will receive checklists, lists of dos and don’ts, and detailed recommendations regarding what it takes to create persuasive mini-lectures.

How Can I Create More Effective Mini-Lectures? includes a CD with the video presentation, supplemental materials, a critical reflection worksheet, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and the program’s transcript.

Want to make this program available for your entire campus?

Consider ordering a Campus Access License for an additional $100. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

That’s not a big surprise. It confirms findings consistently reported. The surprise in the survey was that respondents also were asked to rate the effectiveness of each of these 18 instructional methods in terms of how they helped students acquire information, develop a skill, or apply knowledge. The faculty consistently rated hands-on activities and practical exercises as the two most effective strategies in accomplishing these objectives. Interesting.

Readers of this blog likely use a full range of teaching strategies and activities to engage students. I’m guessing most of us are instructional innovators. It’s faculty like us who are reforming teaching and learning and we’re doing it one class at a time. A large international study of reform in engineering education concluded, “The dominant approach [to curricular change] places the onus for change on individual faculty champions—to date, it has been these innovators who have driven educational reform.” (p. 596)

How closely does this conclusion describe your situation? “Innovations are typically developed within single, isolated courses. Often informed by evidence that alternative pedagogies can improve student learning, such reforms typically have little or no support from their institution. Most funding and support mechanisms in engineering education are built on the assumption that harnessing these local examples of innovation and best practice holds the key to fundamental, long-term change across the discipline.” (p. 596)

Should it be the responsibility of instructional innovators to advance the improvement agenda? Most of us don’t operate from a position of power and our sphere of influence is rather small. We can recommend changes to other teachers, but not much beyond that. Sometimes advocacy for different ways of teaching puts us at risk—if we’re in a department where everyone pretty much teaches the same way, if we’re up for tenure and making waves doesn’t count positively, or if we don’t have a continuing contract.

It doesn’t seem that instructional innovators should be expected to carry the weight of efforts to improve teaching and learning, but does that absolve us of any responsibility for the quality of teaching and learning on our campuses? Although we don’t operate from positions of power, we do have some influence when we advocate for instructional change as research consistently documents that the primary source of new instructional ideas are colleagues.

Nonetheless as the opening survey results so clearly show: getting faculty to make changes, even changes that they know help students learn more effectively, isn’t easy. The engineering study contains even more disturbing results. It looked at examples of successful changes and found that most often they are driven by a threat—possible termination of a degree program or accreditation issues. In other words, it took a risk of losing one’s job to get the most change-averse faculty to finally try a new approach.

No one is saying that lectures should to be abolished. They just shouldn’t be the default instructional strategy. Many of us have changed what happens in our classroom but many more still need to change. Unfortunately, if the motivation to change only comes from a colleague or an external threat, then teaching and learning will continue to improve at a very slow pace — and at the expense of more effective learning experiences for many students. It seems to me there has to be a better way.

References: Smith, D. J. and Valentine, T. (2012). The use and perceived effectiveness of instructional practices in two-year technical colleges. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 23 (1), 133-161.

Graham, R. (2012). The one less traveled by: The road to lasting systemic change in engineering education. Journal of Engineering Education, 101 (4), 596-600.

Parker writes that academics have a tendency to “think the world apart.” “We look at the world through analytical lenses. We see everything as this or that, plus or minus, on or off, black or white; and we fragment reality into an endless series of either-ors.” (p. 64) I see us doing this as teachers and I can’t think of a better example than how being teacher-centered is juxtaposed with being learner-centered. You are either a teacher who lectures (now considered bad) or you are a teacher who involves and engages students (now considered good). In short, this orientation pits teaching against learning.

It is true that for many years the pedagogical focus was on teaching. We assumed (and not without justification) that if teaching improved, so would learning. When teachers demonstrate characteristics like organization, enthusiasm, clarity and fairness, research has shown that students learn more (as measured by higher grades). But the reality of so many students coming to college minus important learning skills stimulated an interest in learning and, along with it, the realization that perhaps we had emphasized teaching too much. Our preference for and focus on learning has now tipped the scale in the other direction.

The thinking that teaching is either teacher-centered or learner-centered breaks an inseparable bond and does so to the detriment of our students and ourselves. Learner-centered teachers still need to lecture, as in tell students things. After all, faculty are the definitive content experts in the classroom and our knowledge and experiences can be immensely helpful to students as they work to master course material and eventually find their way to careers and lives that matter. Meanwhile, those who are teacher-centered should work to engage and involve students. They must recognize that students can learn from each other and that the deepest learning happens when students have the opportunity to practice and obtain feedback.

The best teaching is not one or the other, but a combination of both. As my colleagues Ricky Cox and Dave Yearwood write in the January issue of The Teaching Professor, “It is time to re-assert the role of teacher as a multifaceted individual who contributes to learning inside and outside the classroom. Teachers positively impact students on many levels, including curriculum design, intellectual challenge, personal growth, career guidance and other less tangible ways. Our students not only know us as teachers who design their course, they also know us as people who listen to their aspirations and struggles. Indeed, students’ memories and experiences with teachers are often just as important to their success as the skills they develop and knowledge they acquire.”

Parker Palmer explains why seemingly paradoxical things should be joined. “The poles of a paradox are like the poles of a battery; hold them together and they generate the energy of life; pull them apart, and the current stops flowing. When we separate any of the profound paired truths of our lives, both poles become lifeless specters of themselves…” (p. 67)

It is time for us to start addressing the more complex and interesting task of joining together teacher-centered and learner-centered instruction. The question for those who aspire to be learner-centered is not how to abandon lectures, but to understand when “teaching by telling” effectively advances the learning agenda. Learner-centered teachers should not leave students to muddle through on their own, but must know when to intervene and what kind of interventions enable students to discover their own way to understanding. Teacher-centered instruction does not get bogged down in a morass of policies and prohibitions that establish the teacher’s authority, but explores how to set boundaries within which students can make choices and move toward autonomy in learning.

Reference: Palmer, P. The Courage to Teach. 10th Anniversary Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Lecture Alternatives: Four Strategies to Engage Students

If you’re growing tired of lecturing, imagine how your students feel. After all, you aren’t the only instructor they have. Your students would probably welcome a change of pace as much as you would.

Every semester you’re faced with a daunting task. You have to deliver an entire course of material to a new group of students of varying abilities and academic backgrounds. They have to meet your expectations to earn satisfactory grades, and you have to meet theirs to earn positive evaluations. It’s a two-way street, and there’s a lot riding on what happens in the classroom. How can your students learn all that you expect them to learn if you’re not the one telling them what they need to know?

The reality is, you don’t have to rely so heavily on the lecture to deliver course material. No one is saying to get rid of lectures altogether. Rather, the idea is to infuse your lectures with active-learning strategies. And when you break up the monotony with student-focused exercises, activities, and questions, your students respond with increased participation and better comprehension.

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The list of options for breaking up a lecture is long and varied. Learn easy ways to incorporate active learning into your courses by attending Lecture Alternatives: Four Strategies to Engage Students.

Dr. Alice Cassidy leads this hour-long seminar that will give you the inspiration and ideas you need to refresh your course delivery. An expert on active and participatory learning, Cassidy uses real-world problems and examples, narrative, and visual tools to drive home the value and ease of turning students into learning partners.

After watching Lecture Alternatives: Four Strategies to Engage Students, you will be prepared to:

• Turn readings into active student engagement tools
• Immediately incorporate student feedback into course materials to better reflect the needs of each class
• Turn student questions into whole-class learning opportunities
• Improve learning by leveraging student presentations, field trips, and other class activities

Infusing active learning doesn’t require a total course redesign. In Lecture Alternatives: Four Strategies to Engage Students, Cassidy delivers approaches that you can adapt and adopt right away. You’ll quickly realize that you don’t have to work more to help students learn more.

This seminar is now available on-demand or on CD. Whichever format you choose, you’ll also receive the complete transcript and all supplemental materials.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

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Lectures are still a valuable pedagogical tool, but sometimes lectures are more effective when you use them a little less often and intersperse them with some other tools and techniques. Even slightly shifting the balance of classes can lead to better outcomes for students and, ultimately, better evaluations for you.

Who will benefit

• University, college, and other post-secondary instructors
• Educational and faculty developers

We know that you don’t need a lecture about the value of active learning. What you do need are simple, accessible, and proven approaches that are adaptable to your teaching style and don’t require major revisions to your courses. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Lecture Alternatives: Four Strategies to Engage Students.

One of the points made in the post was affirmed in the commentary. PowerPoint is a tool and that means how it affects learning depends on how it’s used. Tim H. said it clearly and succinctly, “Any statement you can make about PowerPoint, good or bad, can also be made about any other presentation method—chalkboard, overhead projector, etc. PowerPoint is only a tool.”

Most folks who commented use PowerPoint and they do for a number of different reasons. A Guest pointed out that it’s “crucial” in making information “accessible” for students with learning challenges or for whom English is not their first language. Jana M. elaborates in a different direction: “PowerPoint is excellent for the introverted, visual and to some degree auditory learner. However, the tactile, extroverted, verbal learners will quickly become bored and lose the desire to learn.” J. Hardy noted what is repeated in a number of comments, “PowerPoint is an effective tool for showcasing schematic models or diagrams or presenting pictures of key features. . . .” Laurel writes, “Lecturers can often forget to emphasize the ‘four most important points’ as they teach, and all of us learners want to know what those are and why. Creating a good PowerPoint reinforces that information for everyone.” LAB offers a particularly pithy summary. He/she uses PowerPoint “to show my students pictures of places and processes they’ve never encountered.”

Some commented that using PowerPoint benefits the teacher. I hadn’t thought of that before. Dave P. explains. “Preparing PowerPoint slides may be a useful exercise for faculty members because it forces them to think about, organize, and prioritize the material to be covered in a particular lesson.” Dave T said, “Some of the best teaching ideas come as one is preparing a PowerPoint presentation.” Follow-up question: How do we balance these teacher benefits against giving students the opportunity to learn how to organize material on their own? And how do we avoid Bernd S.’s concern that using slides can increase “presentation speed to unacceptable levels”?

A number of comments correctly noted that my post omitted discussing the many other PowerPoint enhancements beyond bulleted points and other forms of texts—enhancements like video clips, websites, blogs, polls, clickers, hot links and various forms of animation used by teachers. Dave L. writes “PowerPoint. . . used as more than a projector for ‘words’ or ‘organization’ promotes interest and should assist learning.” 45Doc70 notes that PowerPoint “gives faculty an incredible amount of creativity.”

Fewer comments decried the use of PowerPoint but those that did listed objections like these. Christopher H. wrote, “Intended or not, PowerPoint is an instrument of faculty control in the classroom. It inhibits interaction, squashes student creativity and inquisitiveness, interferes with faculty responsiveness, and reduces students to passive consumers of knowledge. . .” Keith D. has observed a “depressing number of professors who have no idea how to use such programs. I have seen slides with up to 75 to 100 words on them. . .hour and a half lectures with 50 or 60 slides.” Jana M notes that when there are too many slides “students sit back like they are watching a movie instead of taking notes and asking questions.” Joanne A. shared a comment from a student who loved PowerPoint “because he didn’t have to do anything.”

It was a good exchange with folks doing what I had hoped: revisiting their use of PowerPoint—what they do and why they do it. Thanks to all who contributed! It would be equally useful for students to revisit (or maybe visit for the first time) the role of PowerPoint in their efforts to learn. What does it contribute? When is it a crutch? What learning skills does it develop? It would be interesting for faculty to then ponder students’ perspectives.

Using eye-tracking Tobii Glasses from Tobii Technology to exam the attention patterns of students in the classroom, the study provides new insight into effective teaching techniques that aim to keep students engaged and motivated to learn during lectures.

“Until now, there has been no first-hand, innate measurement of student attention from the student’s perspective in the classroom,” said Rosengrant. “We were able to measure what the students observe during a lecture, how much of their time is dedicated to the material presented in class and, as an instructor, what are the greatest inhibitors to keeping their attention.”

Rosengrant’s four-month pilot study observed eight college students wearing the special glasses to track their eye-gaze patterns during 70-minute pre-elementary education lectures at Kennesaw State University. He found a number of factors that influence whether students remain on task, or allow their attention to drift.

For example, the verbal presentation of new material that is not contained within the instructor’s PowerPoint, the use of humor by the instructor and the proximity of the instructor to the student, all contribute to greater attention from the student. Rosengrant’s study also concluded that “digital distractions” such as mobile phones and the Web, particularly Facebook, are the greatest inhibitors to retaining students’ attention in the classroom. From these insights, Rosengrant stresses the need for professors to alter their lecture structure through the injection of varying activities and the use of humor to engage students.

Rosengrant will publish the full study, “Studying Student Attention via Eye Tracking” in the fall and will continue to expand his research in order to generate insights that can impact the future of classroom instruction and ultimately, students’ success and the field of teaching.

“I hope that this study enlightens the education community about how to engage students effectively in the classroom, maximize student focus on the material and, ultimately, increase their achievement,” added Rosengrant.

Too often we forget how significantly teaching practices shape learning experiences and PowerPoint is a perfect example. It has redefined “what a lecture looks like, consists of, and how it’s experienced,” according to one source quoted in the article (p. 254). Add to that how regularly PowerPoint is used these days. Sixty-seven percent of the 384 students surveyed in this study reported that all or most of their instructors used PowerPoint, another 23% said that at least half their instructors used it and 95% said that their instructors who used PowerPoint did so in all or most class sessions.

The article reviews studies that have looked at the influence of PowerPoint on performance in the course and course grades. Most studies find that PowerPoint has “no measurable influence on course performance and minimal effect on grades.” (p. 243) Yet students often report a favorable view of PowerPoint, saying it helps them with learning, content organization and note taking. The students in this cohort confirmed these positive effects.

What students in this study said they liked about PowerPoint is part of my concern. When asked to identify those features of PowerPoint they found most helpful, about 80% said the software organized lecture content and indicated which points were most important. Eighty-two percent said they “always,” “almost always,” or “usually” copy the information on the slides. Does copying down content word-for-word develop the skills needed to organize material on your own? Does it expedite understanding the relationships between ideas? Does it set students up to master the material or to simply memorize it?

And then there’s the potential of PowerPoint to oversimplify the material. What students need to know is reduced to a bulleted list of five items described in five words or less. (I know, not always.) That does make complicated material more manageable for students and perhaps that’s beneficial, but does it fairly and accurately represent the nature of the material we are asking students to learn? Do the lists convey any sense of context? Do they hint at the complex relationships that exist between and among items on the list?

I also worry that using PowerPoint encourages passivity. Well-designed PowerPoint presentations can be graphically impressive. They do add a great deal of interest and without question make it easier to listen and follow along. But do they encourage interaction? Do they promote critical thinking? Possibly, but often they make having discussions more difficult. The lights are partially dimmed and the seats arranged so that everyone focuses on the screen. Those aren’t features that foster the vibrant exchange of ideas.

Finally, faculty in this survey and other studies report that using PowerPoint improves their teaching. It certainly does help with organization and with keeping teachers on track, but PowerPoint does not easily accommodate those digressions that are necessary to respond to what’s happening at the moment. I do know that some of us digress too much, but there’s a spontaneity to good discussion that fits uncomfortably with a predetermined sequence of slides.

Like so many instructional practices, PowerPoint is not inherently good or bad. It’s all about how we use it and that’s not something about which we can afford to be complacent. Please consider this post an invitation to revisit the role of PowerPoint in teaching and learning. Yours might be an individual assessment, or it might be a conversation that explores assets, limitations and how to make the most of PowerPoint’s potential to improve teaching and promote learning.

What are some of your reasons for using, or not using, PowerPoint? Please share in the comment box below.

Reference: Hill, A., Arford, T., Lubitow, A., and Smollin, L. (2012). “I’m ambivalent about it”: The dilemmas of PowerPoint. Teaching Sociology, 40 (3), 242-256.

Mazur started out teaching like most of us—he lectured, pretty much all the time, until he discovered a problem. His students had learned Newton’s third law of motion—or at least they could recite it (as all physics students can). He decided to test their understanding of it with a conceptual problem involving a collision between a heavy truck and a light car. To his surprise, his students couldn’t answer the problem or they struggled mightily, not only with this but virtually any conceptual problem he gave them.

It seems the students were memorizing the material but not understanding it, and so Mazur decided to change his instructional approach. He replaced teaching by telling with teaching by questioning. He now structures class time around short conceptual questions. He starts with the question which students must first answer individually, then they report their answers and discuss them with each other, explaining, defending and questioning their answers. Mazur (and teaching assistants) circle the classroom asking questions and otherwise guiding student discussions. He might offer a brief presentation but students are the ones solving the problems.

Interestingly, Mazur started using this method of teaching long before it was trendy. In fact, when people discuss the reform of science education, Mazur is frequently mentioned as one of the first who found a better way. And it is a better way, as documented by multiple studies conducted by Mazur and his colleagues and by other college faculty who use the approach or variations of it. Mazur writes, “Data obtained in my class and in classes of colleagues worldwide, in a wide range of academic settings and a wide range of disciplines, show that learning gains nearly triple with an approach that focuses on the student and interactive learning… Most important, students not only perform better on a variety of conceptual assessments, but also improve their traditional problem-solving skills.” (p. 51) His article includes references to this research.

Mazur admits in the article that he lectured on for some time, ignoring signs that there was a problem. Of course, the problem was not with the lectures. His student ratings (which no doubt asked whether he was organized, offered clear explanations, responded to questions and treated students with respect) were high. He lectured well, but students didn’t learn well from listening. When faced with a problem that needed understanding, what they memorized didn’t help them find their way to a solution.

Unfortunately, this continues to be a problem for many students and in many classes. If you don’t think it’s a problem with students in your classes (and it may not be), then dare to do what Mazur did: test your students’ conceptual understanding. See if they can apply what they’ve been taught and if their exam scores document that they’ve learned.

And if they can’t, you can start by blaming the students (although that’s not as easy if you teach at an institution like Harvard). Students are ultimately responsible for what and how they learn. But teachers influence that process in highly significant ways. When I took an undergraduate nonmajors chemistry course with 20 beginning students (part of a learning communities program) in which I was designated the “master learner,” I resolved not to memorize content but to truly understand it. I wanted to be a good model. But the content came so fast. It was all new and very different from anything I’d learned before. I didn’t have time to figure everything out and so started writing down things I didn’t understand on note cards. By the time the first exam rolled around, I had way more note cards than I could get through, even if I pulled an all nighter. So I memorized like mad and did just fine on the exam. Needless to say, I didn’t have much luck persuading the students that we may have done alright on the exam, but we hadn’t really learned the material. They were fine with memorizing and forgetting.

Reference: Mazur, E. Farewell, Lecture? Science, 323 (2 January, 2009), 50-51.

In the case of medical school, where I work, it’s a combination of boards (testing subject knowledge) and licensing examinations. But undergraduates face similar high-stakes testing when they take medical, legal, business, or graduate entrance exams. Even a course final that counts for a large portion of the grade can change the motivation to extrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation wanes quickly when facts are hurled at students via a PowerPoint lecture format, which appears to be the only practical way to get large volumes of information communicated during the class period. This approach virtually curtails teacher-student interaction; there is simply no time for it. I am not condemning lectures per se, but rather wish to raise the dilemma faced by me and other educators who teach content students must know for high-stakes testing. Do we conduct a meaningful discussion of core concepts, or must we deliver a lecture filled with volumes of minutiae and often seemingly irrelevant facts?

By core concepts I am referring to meaningful and relevant material related to the content and presented in class. Teachers provide a scaffold on which the students add facts through individual or group study both in and out of class. This approach encourages students to interact, engage, and connect actively with the subject matter and learning process. I recently tried this approach and would like to share what happened.

I began my class with a slide that read: “If I did not have to be here, would I?” Understandably, most of the 27 medical students in my class unconsciously shook their heads “no.” I then limited my hour-long discussion to 12 slides. There were two breaks during the didactics. During the first break I divided students into four groups. Each group had a pad of paper and instructions to write about the material I had just covered. They were not allowed to use computers, the Internet, or books. After five minutes, the pads were passed to another group, until each group had every pad once, and the final groups did not know the names of any of the writers on the pads of paper. We then discussed what was written on the pads.

My exercise for the second break was a version of the think-pair-share strategy, which students used to determine the best treatment for the disease we were discussing. After class, the students approached me and told me they had thoroughly enjoyed this class session. To my surprise, even though these students had been in classes together for more than two years, many of them said that this was the first time they got to work together in groups. Some said they had discovered that “lectures” could be fun!

But I had another surprise when I looked at the recommended practice test questions on this material. They are supposed to help students prepare for the high-stakes tests. As a practicing physician, I couldn’t answer some of the questions. I wrote what I thought were more pertinent, thought-provoking, and fair test questions; but I worry that these won’t be the ones on those tests that matter.

So I’m back to the dilemma. Are PowerPoint slides that expose students to any foreseeable question on the high-stakes exam the way to go? When I say yes, I see the bored, glazed-over student faces. I see desperate attempts to passively absorb the mountains of facts that accumulate when there are hours of back-to-back lectures in a single day. How much more rewarding it was for me as an educator to watch their boredom become enthusiasm when I made the classroom environment one of interaction and exploration.

This dilemma is one faced by many college educators teaching in programs where students face high-stakes testing. Currently, these high-stakes exams are often tests of rote memorization, not of inquiry or enthusiasm about a subject. Sharing this spirit of inquiry is the reason most of us became educators in the first place. We are teachers, not fact-reciting machines. We need to find a way out of this dilemma that compromises so much of what education should be about.

David Scott Trochtenberg is an associate professor of internal medicine at Meharry Medical College.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 24.8 (2010): 5.

Lecture capture technologies are not new to education. The enterprise solutions that exist are amazing and powerful. Tegrity, Echo 360, Sonic Foundry, Camtasia Relay, Wimba, and Elluminate have all had a hand in the market for some time and they all provide an opportunity for teachers to record content that students can access in a variety of formats and locations. Additionally, there are a number of free tools on the market that allow instructors to narrate anything on their computer screen are valuable tools in any classroom environment.

Changing classroom dynamics
One of the early epiphanies these tools provided was that students who missed a class could “make-up” the lecture and not fall behind. Additionally, students could review the lecture as many times as they needed to understand the material. Both of these scenarios are real and are truly useful to students. But I think that there is an even better use of the tools that I hope will have a larger impact on what happens in classrooms.

By capturing the lecture portions of classes and assigning them as homework, we can use class time to discuss the material and get any questions clarified. In hybrid courses this option is very appealing as it allows teachers and students to make the most of the time they have together to interact with the content in a way that a traditional lecture may not.

Teachers who teach multiple sections of a course in hybrid, fully online, and face-to-face environments may find the rewards of capturing lectures most beneficial. They can record the lectures given in their face-to-face class and use them as the homework or lecture portions of the online sections. Recordings of live classroom lectures often have a different feel to them than the ones that teachers record in their offices or at home, and typically require no additional work on behalf of the presenter.

Creating bite-sized lectures
While enterprise-class lecture capture system deliver impressive results when integrated into a smart classroom, more interesting to me are some of the free and nearly free tools available to capture lecture material. You can record 15 minutes of you talking into a camera and upload it to YouTube, for free. Products like Jing and Screencast, Screenr, and Screencast-o-matic are just a few of the many tools that can capture whatever is on your screen and share it with students, or anyone. These tools are often very flexible in sharing options and you can also store the content created locally on your machine and upload into LMS environments if you wish.

Talking to a computer screen takes some getting used to — the live audience makes us behave a bit differently I suppose — but for me, as an instructional designer, the benefits are quite powerful. One of the comments I hear from teachers is that they create shorter lectures when recording them from offices or home compared to capturing complete live lectures. And that is a good thing. People can only handle so much video online before they begin to lose focus. I try to get teachers to mix up shorter lectures with other activities. Perhaps 10 minutes of lecture followed by a writing or reading activity, before coming back for another short lecture.

This is one of the greatest challenges for instructional designers is selling the message of shorter “chunked” material in online courses when for many years we have based the classroom experience on hour-long lecture type models. Many instructors who were early adopters of lecture capture technology simply recorded their traditional lectures and added them to their courses. Getting them to recreate lectures and break them into smaller chunks with activities in between is not always easy.

Lecture capture technologies will continue to enhance the availability of online content for students in all course types and provide instructors with a means of sharing course content and materials with students. Our challenge as educators is to use the tools well, and in a way that will most benefit the learner.

Free Tools (just a few of many)
Screenr: http://www.screenr.com/
Jing: http://www.techsmith.com/Jing/
Screencast-o-matic: http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/

Enterprise Lecture Capture Solutions
Camtasia Relay: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasiarelay
Tegrity: http://www.tegrity.com/
Mediasite by Sonic Foundry: http://www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite
Echo360: http://echo360.com/
Elluminate: http://www.elluminate.com/
Wimba: http://www.wimba.com/
Wimba and Elluminate are now part of Blackboard Collaborate: http://www.blackboard.com/Collaborate/

Todd Conaway is an instructional designer at Yavapai College, Arizona.

Now José Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, challenges this assumption by asking his faculty to put their lectures online and devote face-to-face classes to discussion. His logic is impeccable. Lecturing is simply delivering delivery, and not much different from reading a textbook in this regard. If so, then why must lectures be held in class? An instructor could just as easily record his or her lectures and put them online for students to view at their leisure. Better yet, the time freed up from delivering the same lectures year after year, course after course, could be spent putting together rich multimedia content that combines narrated PowerPoints, podcasts, Prezis, videos, VoiceThreads, etc.

In fact, why should faculty create their own lectures at all? Bowen notes that our system of faculty creating their own lectures is a bit like having every instructor write his or her own textbook. If faculty wrote all of their own textbooks, most textbooks would be terrible. Why not just use the best lectures that have been posted on iTunesU, TED, etc. for content?

I tell faculty that their real value is not the information stored in their head. After all, nearly all of that information is publicly available in books or journals. A faculty member’s real value is in their interaction with students. The back and forth with students in discussion, or commentary on their assignments to improve their writing, for example, is what gives them value. Faculty should focus on this aspect of their teaching and automate as much as possible the simple content delivery part. Yet most faculty have it backwards—clinging to their lectures as their most important function.

Teachers can test the waters of Bowen’s teaching model by putting one or two of their lectures online and devoting the subsequent class to discussion of the topics in those lectures. I’ve done this with wonderful results. But the secret is to avoid the all-too-easy mistake of falling back into lecturing during class time. As faculty, we think that lecturing is our primary duty, and it is hard to break ourselves of this habit.

One option is to assign students to come to class with one question about the lecture content written on a sheet of paper that the instructor collects to initiate discussion. To avoid embarrassment, have the students crumple up their sheets at the beginning of class and throw them around the room for 30 seconds. Then have each student pick up one of the pieces and start reading them in order to guide discussion.

Give it a try, and let me know how it works.

Resources
This video features an interview with José Bowen as he explains why he removed technology from his classroom, and the resulting benefits. Watch it here »

Lecture sites

• TED—Wonderful compilation of short lectures on interesting topics. http://www.ted.com/
• Free Video Lectures—over 18,000 free lectures. http://freevideolectures.com/
• Video Lectures—Great lecture exchange site. http://videolectures.net/
• iTunesU—Must download the player to access the lectures. http://www.apple.com/education/ipodtouch-iphone/

Feedback
As usual, I welcome your comments, criticisms, and cries of outrage in the comments section of this blog.

John Orlando, PhD, is the program director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.

They began by tracking down the sources, starting with some well-known books that include this attention span statistic. What they found was quite surprising: “It turns out that the research concerned attention only indirectly or not at all and that several frequently cited sources were not empirical studies, but secondary sources or personal observations.” (p. 87)

For example, some of the research cited as documenting the statistic looked at how many notes students took throughout a lecture—assuming that fewer notes meant lower levels of attentiveness. But the most recent study in this group found that although the amount of notes did decline across the period, student retention of the material did not.

A number of authors report on the decline in attention based on observation—in some cases, their own, and in others, that of independent judges. In the best of these studies, observers noted a low level of attentiveness at the beginning of the lecture and again sometime between 10 and 18 minutes into the lecture. However, this study suffers from several significant methodological flaws.

Finally, some researchers looked at retention of the material, assuming that if retention is low, students are not paying attention. This research does document that students do not retain a lot of lecture material, between 40 percent and 46 percent in one study. They were tested on content recall immediately after listening to and taking notes on a lecture. But, surprisingly, retention of content was pretty much stable across lecture periods of different lengths.

None of this says that students listen well in class. For most of us, that would be a hard sell. But it does challenge a widely touted statistic. Wilson and Korn don’t believe that their inquiry excuses faculty from developing ways to keep students attentive and focused on course content. They also believe that individual differences are relevant when considering how well students are listening. And they think that what students have in their notes is more important than how many of them they are taking.

Reference
Wilson, K. and Korn, J. H. (2007). Attention during lectures: Beyond ten minutes. Teaching of Psychology, 34 (2), 85–89.

Excerpted from Student Attention Spans, The Teaching Professor, January 2008.

Dr. Maryellen Weimer is the editor The Teaching Professor, and a professor emerita, teaching and learning, Penn State-Berks.

I now begin each lesson with a creative review of the last week’s materials. The reviews involve a variety of techniques for getting students to reflect on previous content and ready to move on to new information. They also help with building relationships, a critical component of teacher-student interactions. Here are some of the strategies that I think work best to accomplish these goals.

Who’s Your Partner?
Using sticky-back name tags, I put three or four names that go together on the tags. Some examples are John, Paul, Ringo, and George, or Bill, Chelsea, and Hillary. I then randomly put the name tags on the backs of students. The students are allowed to find their partners by asking only yes and no questions. When they find the rest of their group, I have them work on a short review assignment. This can be a list of questions from the previous week’s content or a reflection or anything that requires that they work together. The process of finding the rest of the group takes only a few minutes and gets students active and focused.

Piece the Puzzle
For this activity I break the content from the last lecture into four or five sections. Then I take key points from each section and make them into jigsaw puzzles, one puzzle for each section, with five or six pieces per puzzle. I jumble the pieces and give a set of puzzles to each group of students. I generally make each set of puzzles on a different color of paper and put the jumbled pieces in a Ziploc bag. Each group completes all the puzzles. This requires them to categorize previously learned information. I like to engage in competition for prizes from the local dollar store. The first table to complete all the puzzles correctly wins the prize. Another variation is to give each student a piece of a puzzle and have the student locate the other four or five students who have pieces to the same puzzle—I don’t make the puzzles different colors in this case.

Roundtable Review
With this activity, I have students get out a sheet of paper and write a list of numbers from one to ten. Then I instruct them to put one important idea from the previous lecture on the first line. The paper is passed to the person on the left. Each time the paper is passed, the person receiving the paper writes a different idea. After a few minutes I call time, and the papers go back to the original owner. This represents a collection of ideas for future review and study.

I have found that the preparation for these activities takes very little time and that the results are very worthwhile. My students anticipate the activities, and I look forward to having the students in a place where they are ready to learn.

Reprinted from How to Get Wet without Plunging In: Creative Ways to Start Class. The Teaching Professor, January 2006.

Shannon Harp and Amy Maslich (reference below) decided to test the effects of what they call “seductive details” in a short recorded college lecture on lightning. They define seductive details precisely: “interesting, tangentially related adjuncts that are irrelevant to the lesson.” (p. 100) So, for example, in the lecture of lightning, which focused on the steps in the causal chain that result in a flash of lightning, the lecturer mentioned that lightning kills approximately 150 Americans a year. The lecture also included details that explained why swimmers are sitting ducks for lightning strikes (because water conducts electricity well) but metal planes in flight escape damage because they offer no resistance and the lightning passes right through them.

The researchers discovered that students who heard the lecture with the seductive details recalled significantly fewer of the main ideas and provided significantly fewer acceptable solutions than students who were not exposed to the interesting but extraneous details.

The researchers point out, “these results do not mean that college lectures should be uninteresting. Although teachers should avoid using seductive details, they should not hesitate to use interesting details such as examples that clearly support the learning objectives. Seductive details, by definition, are irrelevant in terms of supporting the intended learning objectives: they are fluff.” (p. 102)

To safeguard against interesting details that sidetrack students, the lecturer must know clearly what it is students are supposed to learn from the material. The best way to find out what students are taking from the material is to solicit feedback about what they are learning. If they are repeating the details but missing the main point, then those details are getting in the way of learning. As these researchers point out, the best source of intriguing details is the material itself. Look there first for interesting facts that will corral student attention and make their learning of what they should be learning easier.

Excerpted from Can You Make a Lecture Too Interesting? The Teaching Professor, Aug-Sept. 2005.

I now begin each lesson with a creative review of the last week’s materials. The reviews involve a variety of techniques for getting students to reflect on previous content and ready to move on to new information. They also help with building relationships, a critical component of teacher-student interactions. Here are some of the strategies that I think work best to accomplish these goals.

Who’s Your Partner?
Using sticky-back name tags, I put three or four names that go together on the tags. Some examples are John, Paul, George, and Ringo. I then randomly put the name tags on the backs of students. The students are allowed to find their partners by asking only yes and no questions. When they find the rest of their group, I have them work on a short review assignment. This can be a list of questions from the previous week’s content or a reflection or anything that requires that they work together. The process of finding the rest of the group takes only a few minutes and gets students active and focused.

Piece the Puzzle
For this activity I break the content from the last lecture into four or five sections. Then I take key points from each section and make them into jigsaw puzzles, one puzzle for each section, with five or six pieces per puzzle. I jumble the pieces and give a set of puzzles to each group of students. I generally make each set of puzzles on a different color of paper and put the jumbled pieces in a Ziploc bag. Each group completes all the puzzles. The first table to complete all the puzzles correctly wins a prize.

Roundtable Review
With this activity, I have students get out a sheet of paper and write a list of numbers from one to 10. Then I instruct them to put one important idea from the previous lecture on the first line. The paper is passed to the person on the left. Each time the paper is passed, the person receiving the paper writes a different idea. After a few minutes I call time, and the papers go back to the original owner. This makes a nice collection of ideas for future review and study.

I have found that the preparation for these activities takes very little time and that the results are very worthwhile. My students anticipate the activities, and I look forward to having the students in a place where they are ready to learn.

Patty Kohler-Evans is an assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas.

Excerpted from How to Get Wet without Plunging In: Creative Ways to Start Class, The Teaching Professor, January 2006.

But the note did remind me that we haven’t provided much on lectures recently, and in all the classrooms I visited this semester, lectures were certainly alive and well (although some were not very healthy). My search for current resources uncovered the article referenced below, which identifies 10 “worthwhile considerations” that should be addressed by those who lecture. The author teaches in a science area and pulls examples from that content.

1.Active Student Involvement — “Sitting for an hour and taking in new information is difficult, even for the most internally motivated college student.” (p. 454) Interactive components need to be present in all college lectures, even those delivered to 500 students.

2.Relevance – Students taking large introductory courses (like history, business, or journalism students enrolled in biology) often do not understand why they need to know the Kreb cycle or phases of meiosis. Instructors need to start by asking themselves hard questions about relevance. If the content is relevant (meaning this is something non- science majors really need to know), that relevance must be made explicit. To those outside the discipline it is not generally obvious.

3.Interest – It is difficult to hold students’ attention for an entire lecture. Don’t underestimate how difficult it is. Use various strategies to support your efforts to do so. Maybe you can wear costumes or use props, but if that isn’t your style, opt for interesting facts and intriguing details. The author of this article describes for students the “party animal” behavior of Pacific squid who gather in large groups and who, after several bouts of mating and egg laying, all die.

4.Expert/Novice Difference — We all know who’s the expert and who’s the novice in the classroom, but what the experts often fail to realize is that students process course content at different rates and in different ways. What helps all learners process new information is linking it to what they already know, connecting abstract concepts to more concrete ideas, and moving from simple facts to more complex generalizations.

5.Cognitive Overload — Information-dense lectures lead to cognitive overload. Students’ minds shut down and their eyes glaze over. If you continue, you are proceeding without them. Stop — provide a brief review; take time for a question; and position the material that’s about to come in relation to what’s just been presented.

6.Scientific Jargon – Science is not the only field with lots of jargon — this applies to every discipline. Sometimes it’s both a new word and a new concept. When you’re learning French and you’re introduced to the word chat when you find out it means cat at least you know what it refers to. But when it’s cytokinesis, it’s all new. Other times the words are familiar like vacuum but when a scientist uses that term, it doesn’t usually refer to a cleaner.

7.Mental Lapses — Sometimes students just don’t get it in a lecture. They may if you say it once more or say it a little louder, but usually not. They need to hear you say it in a totally different way. They need examples, maybe a metaphor. Or, they may need you to take a short break so that they can discuss, explore, and explain it to the person sitting next to them.

8.Note-Taking Skills — Not all students have good ones. And to the extent they are worried about the difficulty of the content and their ability to understand, their motivation to write down exactly what the lecturer says increases. As the author points out, they are then so busy writing, they miss half of what is said. Spend a bit of time helping students learn what they need to write down. Sometimes an outline or guide distributed early in the course can help reinforce this lesson.

9.Confronting Misconceptions – Students can memorize right answers, regurgitate them on an exam, and leave the class with their original thinking still unchallenged. The author advises that lecturers be aware of the common misconceptions students bring to a course and tackle them head on. Don’t let students leave a course with their thinking undisturbed.

10.Learning Modalities – We live in a visual society and many students are visual learners. Lecturers need to reckon with these facts and make use of the wide array of visual supports now available –demonstrations, videos, computer animations, even the venerable overhead transparency which should not look like a page of text.

None of these ideas are new, but many of them are still absent from lectures delivered in lots of college classrooms. The author offers a nutshell summary: “Presenting an effective lecture is like writing a good drama — you must have a worthwhile story to tell and tell it in an interesting way.” (p. 454)

Conin Jones, L. L. (2002). Are lectures a thing of the past? Journal of College Science Teaching, 32 (7), 453-457.