Ferdinand von Prondzynsky (President of Dublin City University) recently posted an interesting article about a new phenomenon in education called the “microlecture”. Essentially a microlecture is a 60 second blast of information, delivered as a video or audio podcast. Now while Ferdinand, a man I have great respect for, was careful not to be instantly dismissive of what could be argued to be a daft new fad thought up by touchy feely educationalists eager to squander, I mean capture, more research funding he did point out that such an approach essentially eliminates some of the most important aspects of education: analysis, discussion and criticality. In this sense there is definitely a point to be made – most educational traditions eschew the rote learning approach in favour of students who can analyse, assess and create knowledge rather than mindlessly accept everything that is fed to them.
To put this in perspective I should probably explain a little bit about how microlectures work. Developed by David Penrose, the self-styled “One Minute Professor” microlectures involve stripping all of the unnecessary “padding” from a typical lecture and reducing it to a burst of keywords and phrases which are topped and tailed by roughly 30 seconds of introduction and conclusion. Lasting between 60 seconds to 3 minutes Penrose argues in an interview published on Chronicle.com that the format is a “framework for knowledge excavation” where “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.” To some this might sound like a polite way of saying that lecturers get to put their feet up while the students do all the work (although others might ask whether this is a bad thing at all).
But anyway, let’s go back and address that niggling feeling which most of us probably have that microlecturing amounts to a dumbing down of education (a) because of the fact that a gimmicky 60 seconds is nowhere near long enough to impart all of the essential information and (b) there is no time or place for discussion, analysis or criticality. There probably is some mileage in the idea that the microlecture is not for everyone and most certainly not for every subject. At first glance it does seem more suited to technical or practical subjects than to certain theoretical subjects where analysis is essential.
Having said that, it is a possibility that it’s not the format or indeed its incompatibility with certain subjects that’s the problem. It could just be the course design and the sequencing of topics and classes within a course. In other words it might all boil down to the teachers themselves. I can see a clear use for microlectures as a primer for a particular topic. Imagine a microlecture outlining the key concepts in an area, say legal translation or usability issues in website design. Students are blasted with a bite-size overview of the topic and then told to build on it in preparation for a conventional lecture, tutorial or workshop in a week or two. This would, I imagine, usher students into a learning style where they create their own knowledge, they direct their own learning… already buzzwords like constructivism, inquiry-based learning, transferable skills and information literacy are circling overhead like flies. And this, I think, might be the hidden value of microlectures. It’s not what they contain, it’s how they can be used. As a primer or starting point, the microlecture can represent a scaffold (constructivist slang for “a hook to hang your coat on”) upon which students can build knowledge as they explore and learn about a subject. I’m not sure whether it will work – I think there are various pedagogical, organisational and cultural issues to be tackled – and only time will tell whether this is a genuine advance in learning or just another woolly attempt to pander to what some would call the Facebook generation with their ever-decreasing attention spans.
For more information about the microlecture format, take a look at the following:- http://www.openeducation.net/2009/03/08/online-education-introducing-the-microlecture-format/
- http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i26/26a00102.htm
#1 by John Kearns - April 12th, 2009 at 20:48
I see your point but there’s a fallacy in assuming that something that necessarily fits into 60 seconds is necessarily dumbed down. What about aphorisms? Or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – a book that made a virtue out of succinctness, if not comprehensibility. The answer to life, the universe & everything is 42 – takes a lot less than a minute to say that…
The real benefit in the 60-second lecture – or in a (limited) series of 60 second lectures – would be firstly for the lecturer to get stuff sorted and prioritised in his/her own head. So yes, in your terms, ‘a scaffold’ decided on (i.e. figured out) by the teacher (is there just one canonical way to teach, say, translation theory? I’ve not yet seen a course book in the field that emphasises all the stuff I think needs to be prioritised, so I like the idea of sitting down and trying to prioritise stuff for myself.)
FvP gives the example of such lectures being used for health & safety courses. With those I’d imagine you’d have a highly structured and predefined corpus of material to get through. This doesn’t apply to your average arts course. Or at least it oughtn’t to, though I know a fair few people in translation studies who just teach a textbook from start to finish. I’d even be cautious of being too critical of this – at least there’s a structure that the student, should they feel so inclined, can refer back to. What we really want to get away from is the lecturer writing a list of 10 topics to be covered at the start of term and then going in each week and talking about each in a meandering improv like some decrepit Colonel Blimp reminiscing about his schooldays over a cognac and cigar in his old boys country club. (Though I firmly believe my teaching practice could be improved by cognac and cigars, another factor adding to the appeal of podcasts recorded in the privacy of my own home).
I used to always finish classes (or start subsequent classes) by asking students to write down in just one sentence what they’d learned. Aside from making them feel they’ve actually learned something, this also makes the teacher look less of a bozo when another lecturer takes over the following year, asks the students what they did in their translation lectures the previous year, and is greeted by total silence. If you can convince the buggers that they’ve learned just 6 or 7 things and then further teach them to recite these things when someone asks them whether they’ve learned anything, you’ve earned your money…
#2 by Jody Byrne - April 14th, 2009 at 18:02
You’re absolutely right John that a 60 second lecture shouldn’t be regarded as a dumbed down version of a “real” lecture but I think most people would initially recoil at the prospect at least until they had a chance to think about it properly.
I like the fact that microlectures seem to provide the flexibility to allow students to examine an area in their own way (within some form of framework, of course) and not stick to a rigidly predefined set of material and topics which can stifle creativity and possibly engagement with the subject. Of course there will be cases when this is essential but not always.
I think you raise an interesting point when you refer to lecturers getting things sorted and prioritised in their own heads. This to me seems useful when you consider that most lecturers don’t actually have any training in how to teach. Do you think the microlecture could help lecturers become better educators or is it something that requires ability in the first place?
#3 by John Kearns - April 15th, 2009 at 22:14
Given that, as you say, most lecturers have no training in how to teach, it’s fair to assume that those that start to work at improving their teaching practice off their own steam are also the ones who’ll be drawn to innovations like microlecture podcasts. BUT given that they’re ones more likely to be innovative in the first place, they’ll probably be less of a problem anyway. If the micro-lectures do end up dumbing down courses, it’ll only be after they become accepted at an institutional level. Before that, though, I wonder if this will happen to things like Moodle and e-groups – at the moment (at least in Poland) it’s the brighter, snazzier lecturers that use them, but I reckon there’ll come a point where the deadwood that drifts around in most academic departments in the world will adopt them purely as labour-saving devices, without any thought to how they can be used to make teaching more effective.
Oooh there I go again – moan, moan, moan….