Comments on: Education at the speed of light (almost)… the Microlecture

By: John Kearns

John Kearns — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:14:50 +0000

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….

By: Jody Byrne

Jody Byrne — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:02:42 +0000

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?

By: John Kearns

John Kearns — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:48:48 +0000

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…