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15 March 12-2pm GMT
Do teaching models in higher education need reinventing? – live chat
Michael Barber, chief education adviser of the world's largest education firm, Pearson, has been reported saying middle-ranking UK universities could face extinction
within the next 10 years if they don't find a way to "mark themselves out of the crowd". He said the traditional lecture model is outdated and remarked it was
pointless for 100 universities to develop the same courses when "the best professors are making their course available for free".
He said universities needed to move away from the traditional lecture model and embrace one of five models: the elite institution, the mass university, the niche
institute, the local university or the institution that specialises in educating mature students. Barber said one advantage universities had over free online courses was
their attachment to a city.
A scene from the film Goodbye, Mr Chips. But with the ongoing transformation of HE, are traditional teaching methods still the best? Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
If it's not just universities that face extinction, but university lectures too, is it time to rethink the way academics teach
in Universities? Is the traditional lecture model still sustainable? How do lecturers now see their role in higher
education? And what do they think is the teaching model of the future?
We've already seen a major shift in the landscape with the creation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) both
overseas – Coursera, Udacity and edX – and in the UK – FutureLearn – providing thousands of free online courses for
anyone, anywhere, with an internet connection.
This has led to big dilemmas not only for institutions, but academics themselves: should they get on board the MOOC
train, boost their academic profile and make their course content freely available online – or fear being left behind? Many academics are turning teaching on its head
to keep up with rising student expectations and knowledge competition from the web. Developments include:
• Flipped classroom – a form of blended learning that sees pupils completing course material ahead of lessons to free up time with their teachers and apply the
knowledge they have just learned
• Flipped academic – the academic who informs first and publishes later, using teaching time and community engagement to feed into research
"What do we do on campus with the space and time freed up by online learning?" asked Andrew Bollington, chief operating officer of the University of London
International Programmes, at the Guardian's Future of Higher Education Summit last month. This is where the pedagogy gets interesting, he added.
Questions to be discussed:
• Is it time to rethink teaching in higher education? • What are the threats to current teaching models?
• What might be a sustainable model for the future? • How can we use campus and classroom time better?
The following comments were posted by people who joined in the live chat:
After all these years I’m amazed that the standard
teacher-learner relationship has lasted so long. It
has its benefits, so it’s not completely redundant,
but it does tend to hinder development of peer
learning in the HE environment. The role of
students in the learning process is still
undervalued . . . potentially they have a major
contribution to play not just in terms of classroom
interaction, but also in relation to curriculum
design, assessment and delivery.
Lectures are a hangover from an age when
the scarcity of printing facilities meant that
books were a luxury and a lecturer literally
read out the book and students took notes.
There is plenty of literature from the last 60
years (Bloom, 1953, Gibbs, 1981, Cashin
1985) highlighting the defficiencies of
lectures as a learning experience, mainly that
they are such a passive experience.
I would like people to stop rabbiting on about this 'flipped
classroom' as if it's just been brought down the mountain
by Moses. This method of learning has been around for
decades, in fact, it has been standard practice for decades.
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Let's face it most lecturers are simply afraid of change
and being exposed as overpaid dinosaurs. These MOOCs
might be gimmicky but at least they are exposing the fact
that many lectures/lecturers are sub-par, and that they
need to up their game.
Fully agree that the flipped classroom is, in essence,
what most academics have done from the year dot; ask
students to prepare for the next class; and, students,
from the year dot, have done more or less of it as they
see the need/have the inclination / time/ whatever.
Lectures should always stay,
they are a great method for a
talented person to inspire a
lot of people at once. But bad
lectures (and therefore bad
teaching) will diminish, it's too
exposed now. Less Sage and
more Guide.
I doubt we're seeing the death of the lecture, but perhaps instead
the reinvention. Bad lecture-based teaching is going to become
increasingly visible thanks to technology exposing it. The idea of
the sage on the stage, delivering their non-interactive and nonengaging sermon of yesteryear's thoughts are hopefully phasing
out. Why would one attend when it's also on YouTube?
What is lacking are tutoring skills to
get students to do things in these
large spaces. This is not often easy
with lecture rooms designed as
serried ranks rather than educational
spaces.
"There is no simple relationship
between what is taught and what is
learnt" (Gibbs, 1981)
G.Gibbs Twenty terrible reasons for
lecturing, SCED Occasional Paper No.
8, Birmingham. 1981.
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/o
csld/resources/20reasons.html
I think a useful way to view it is
that we have a greatly extended
toolkit now. We used to only have
the lecture, or the tutorial. But
now you have these plus, third
party resources, forums,
synchronous sessions, blogs,
wikis, etc. In the same way that
the academic wishing to
disseminate information has
more to choose from that just
books or articles, they can use
blogs, social networks, youtube
etc. So it's not that the lecture
(or insert traditional means of
your choice) is dead, it's just that
it no longer has a monopoly.
I make a distinction between lectures and classroom based learning.
Methods like the Just in Time Teaching approach (Noval et al, 1997)
have worked well for us. Students study the basic knowledge outside
the class via a list of assigned reading / viewing and take a short
assessment, then the classroom session picks up on deficiencies in
knowledge highlighted by the assessment and uses more active
activities to embed and contextualise the knowledge and promote
higher order thinking.
I think the problem is being overstated to quite a large degree. The vast
majority of learning at university will be delivered in small seminars.
Occasionally you will have a foundational course that necessitates a
large lecture group but in both my experience as a student and
professional, these are the exception