From lecture to story-telling

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During my schooldays and even at university I believed that I would be assessed on how well I remembered what the teachers told us in class. We were lead to believe that anything the teacher "went through" in class could come up in the exam. What we read in our textbooks was supplementary knowledge. The teacher probably also felt obliged to cover all possible questions to avoid accusations after the exam that "you never mentioned that in class". I taught for many years using this model and tried to cram in as much useful information as possible into my lessons in the belief that this was how the students learned best. So we were all locked in this information transfer illusion of learning that is still very common in education all over the world. Even if active learning and flipped classroom have become accepted and widely used, the default is still the traditional lecture.

This is discussed in an article by Harald Liebich in the Norwegian higher education news site Khrono (just use a translation tool), Er forelesningen et ritual eller en læringsarena? (Is the lecture a ritual or a learning arena?). Whenever the media or popular culture want an image to represent higher education it is nearly always the lecture hall with the professor on stage. He describes how lectures simply repeat what is much better described in a textbook and that students remember very little of value. A method with such limited impact on students' learning must be questioned. 

The time invested by lecturers and students does not correspond to the intended outcome; the enhancement of learning. The limited impact of initiatives to implement innovative teaching methods can be linked to the lack of incentives for pedagogical development in the whole university sector. [My translation]

Forelesers og studentens tidsbruk står ikke i forhold til hovedintensjonen; læringsutbytte. Manglende drivkraft til å fornye undervisningsformene, kan ha sammenheng med at undervisningsarbeid gir begrenset merittering innen universitetsfeltet.

The lecture is indeed a ritual and should in most cases be transformed into an arena for group work and discussion. At the same time, I wonder if the ritual element still has relevance in terms of creating and cementing a sense of belonging. Attending a lecture every week reminds students that they are part of the university as an institution and reinforces a sense of pride and tradition that should not be underestimated. You may not learn so much but simply being there gives you a sense of identity just as walking about the campus or chatting in the cafeteria. I know that many people prefer to study in the library even if you could easily do so more comfortably at home. Somehow the library feels more academic, more inspiring, more serious. Also you can see lots of other people studying and you want to blend into the studious ambiance. This was transformed into an online setting during the pandemic with sites like StudyStream where you could join a silent video meeting, watching other students studying at their desks. 

Lectures have a role to play but only is used sparingly. Liebich quotes an article in the journal Health Professions Education, On the Use and Misuse of Lectures in Higher Education, that reviews research in the value of the lecture and describes the methods limitations. However, there are times when a lecture can be valuable, especially as inspiration. The lecturer's role is not to provide content but to offer different perspectives and insights into their own research process. The vital element is to offer reflection, experience and inspiration - basically to tell an engaging story. 

Articles describe only the end product of a scientific endeavor and do so in a static and formal way. Students however deserve to hear the whole story; the story of how the researcher developed a particular hypothesis, the story of the difficulties the researcher encountered, and his or her emotions when a cherished hypothesis turned out to be false. Who can tell these stories better than the researcher him- or herself? These narratives should be told and the lecture is a good place to do just that, in particular if the lecturer knows how to tell a good story.

The lecture may be an academic ritual but if the speaker can offer this story-telling element and convey enthusiasm and commitment to the subject matter it can also play an important role in the students' development.

Post-pandemic university - real or cosmetic change?

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Educational technology enables us to rethink teaching and learning. It offers us the opportunity to widen participation in education, create more accessible and inclusive learning spaces and to offer greater levels of flexibility and collaboration. That sounds great but why haven't we seen this revolution yet, even after the pandemic? There seems instead to be a backlash against online education now that campuses are "back to normal".  The trouble is that changing the way that universities teach is not simply in the hands of digitally skilled teachers and support staff. The whole system needs to change and that has not happened yet.

This is discussed in an excellent article by Neil Mosely, Is the university education model forever changed?. Teachers can experiment and redesign their courses to a certain extent but there are many constraints against radical change. Changing a course syllabus can take months if not years. Teachers are allotted a set number of lecture hours during which they are expected to lecture. Facilitating collaborative problem-based learning based mostly on asynchronous activities does not fit into the administrative system. Even if the teachers get support and inspiration it's not easy to challenge these principles.

As well as that they didn’t realise that changing the mode of teaching and study needs a change of the way you operate. It’s not simply a case of providing the technologies, some workshops, some inspirational “innovative” teachers...it requires something much more fundamental than that.

The university model is what it is because of the many parameters that make it and define it as a model. If you want to change the model then it’s not simply a case of imploring staff to do something different within the confines of the old model, but rather orchestrating the organisational change necessary to move to a new model.  

This rings true for so many educational technologists who offer inspirational workshops, seminars and consultation to teachers but discover that the uptake is low or the effects marginal beyond the dedicated band of true believers. True the university is much more digital today than before the pandemic but the fundamental principles remain untouched. Hybrid teaching or lecture capture would seem to be typical compromises where we can basically continue as usual but with an optional digital add-on.. Is digital an integrated part of the whole university experience? Are online students equally treated and equally welcome? The hybrid classroom looks promising but is it really breaking any barriers of simply preserving hierarchies?

If you want to change the teaching and study model then you have to change the organisational model that buttresses it. This is hard, and the pandemic hasn’t necessarily helped as it has led to a conceited sense of organisational agility. When thinking about where universities are at due to the pandemic and gauging this against where they might like to be, we would all do well to heed the words of Irene Peter:

“Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.”

We still have a long way to go.

Hybrid classrooms - impressive solutions but are we asking the right questions?

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Educational institutions all over the world are busy redesigning their classrooms and buying lots of hardware to facilitate hybrid teaching. The pandemic has revealed a need to offer more flexibility in how courses are run, offering students the choice of whether to attend classes on site or online. Many institutions have been doing this for many years but suddenly hybrid has become mainstream and there is a frenzy of ed tech investment. The challenge is to ensure that the online students are not simply passive observers but can participate as fully as their counterparts on site. This inevitably involves more advanced technology in the classroom with multiple screens, microphones and cameras so that everyone can be seen and heard clearly and that slideshows, whiteboards and collaborative tools can be easily shared. 

Some excellent examples of hybrid classrooms are described in a detailed post by Zac Woolfitt, The future is bright - the future is hybrid. He describes how four European universities are redesigning their classrooms for a hybrid future: University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven, Imperial College London and Oulu University of Applied Sciences. All are very impressive and I urge you to read the article to get the details. Online students are visible on large screens, cameras automatically focus on the speaker in the classroom and high quality microphones ensure that everyone is heard. Not only have they upgraded their larger lecture theatres to cope with hundreds of students at a time but they have also equipped smaller classrooms and group rooms for hybrid sessions. Some solutions are like sophisticated TV studios and each lesson will require careful planning between teachers and production staff. Others are less complex but still demand that teachers rethink their teaching to adapt to the technical affordances.

However, all of them admit that they have still not found the best solution and that hybrid teaching still presents many challenges. Complex technical solutions demand qualified staff to assist the teacher, or require teachers to be well trained in using the equipment; resulting in an almost impossible juggling act trying to focus on both teaching and on managing the technology.

Finding ways to combine collaboration online and on campus remains a challenge. Those presenting here thought that there is more hybrid collaboration than every before. The solutions provided currently work, but it is expected the demands and context will change in a few years. Some have only been running Hybrid classrooms for less than a year. The feedback from students will provide lots of input. Creating really good hybrid breakout rooms has not yet been achieved yet and requires improvements in the technology. For some students, it is not easy to learn remotely, and they want to be in class, in contact with fellow students.

They are all impressive initiatives that aim at providing all students with a high quality experience no matter how they choose to participate. However, I wonder if we are asking the right questions here. These solutions are expensive and unrealistic for many institutions, especially in less developed countries. I also wonder if we place too much importance on synchronous events. No matter how much technology you have in the classroom, any gathering of more than 30 students means that the majority of them will not say a word during the session and that interaction will be limited. Large lecture theatres, no matter how much technology you buy, will always favour lecturing with the teacher in focus. Of course there is value in gathering all students in a synchronous event from time to time. It reinforces a sense of community and common purpose. But I would like to see a greater emphasis on group work, investigating, analysing and solving problems, and this is done in a combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration rather than in large class meetings. Maybe the hybrid classroom does not need to be so sophisticated. Shorter focused hybrid sessions to set up the task and then let the students work together in hybrid groups. This requires lots of flexible group rooms on campus but those require often only a screen, webcam and microphone. Learning to work in virtual teams to solve problems and find solutions are also vital skills to learn for most professions in a world where international travel is likely to become increasingly unfeasible.

Challenging assumptions about learning

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Do you have a clear idea of how you learn and what teaching methods help you most? I certainly don't and I'm close to retirement. However we continually ask students to evaluate their courses and draw conclusions from their feedback. Student course evaluations form the basis for future course design and administration but I wonder if we are asking the right questions. 

This is a topic discussed in a post by Zach Groshell, Do Students Have a Good Idea of What Helps Them Learn? We are asking them to evaluate a complex process that they have limited insight into and often the benefits of good teaching become clear months or even years later. He refers to a recent study, On students’ (mis)judgments of learning and teaching effectiveness. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(2), 137–151), that investigates the hidden biases and subjective impressions behind student course evaluations. They found for example a mismatch between what the students thought they had learned and their test results. They preferred traditional content-rich lectures to more active sessions despite studies showing that active participation leads to deeper learning. They were also highly influenced by subjective perceptions of the teacher's status, enthusiasm, gender, ethnic background and accent (as we all are). I hasten to add that we are all subject to these biases.

As we have seen, empirical research has provided a wealth of results showing that students are poor evaluators of their own learning, and that their subjective impressions of teaching effectiveness are vulnerable to many biases that are unrelated to teaching and learning… Does this make it risky for instructors to use effective learning techniques? Particularly early in their careers and in teaching-focused positions, instructors may find themselves faced with the difficult decision of whether to incorporate teaching practices that gain them recognition as effective instructors, even if such practices do not positively impact students’ learning.

This poses a tricky question to teachers - do you teach for student satisfaction or teach for learning, even if it may lead to dissatisfaction and poor evaluations? An ambitious teacher who decides to promote active learning and student collaboration runs the risk of students misunderstanding their pedagogy and even a reprimand from the head of department when the poor evaluations emerge. Most of us can remember a teacher we hated at the time but with hindsight realise had pushed and challenged us to a higher level of understanding. What we think we want is not always what we need.

On a similar theme of assumptions and biases is an article by Perry Samson in Educause Review, Students Often Prefer In-Person Classes . . . Until They Don’t. We often assume that students prefer classroom teaching and student surveys show a clear preference for this. However, in this study the students were offered three levels of participation, the hyflex model of on-site, online or asynchronous interaction. Although they at first preferred to be in class, physical attendance declined as the course went on.

Given reasonable options, students in my class did not prefer the in-person mode of course delivery. In fact, the number of students who physically attended class dropped precipitously to an average of around 20% by mid-semester (see figure 1). At the same time, about one-third of students opted to participate synchronously during class time (see figure 2), with a growing number, reaching about 30%, participating asynchronously. The number of students who didn't participate any given day was relatively consistent throughout the semester at about 15%.

The test results showed that the on-site students performed no better than the others, in fact the first-year students who studied asynchronously (recorded lectures, forum discussion etc) had better results than those who attended classes in person. The study is of course limited and offers no exploration of the students' preferences but it does show that students appreciate the choice of participation modes more than we might assume.

My conclusion here is that we need greater dialogue with students about teaching and learning, explaining in advance why we are using a particular approach and getting them to buy into the method through together discussing rules of engagement and building a framework for feedback and reflection. Expectation management is so important and so pre-course information is so much more than just presenting a syllabus. It's setting an agenda and helping students understand how to succeed.

Active uninterest and the power of storytelling

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One of the highlights of this week was listening to an excellent keynote speech by Jo Røislien, professor of medical statistics at the University of Stavanger, at a Norwegian conference on motivation for learning (FuNKon 21 – Motivasjon for læring). He introduced the concept of active uninterest to describe popular attitudes to his field (maths, statistics). Whenever these subjects are mentioned people seem to almost take pride in how little they know. It's similar for most technical subjects as well as economics. People almost boast about how boring they think these subjects are and how little they remember from school. This is curious considering that our entire society and understanding of the world around us depends on these sciences but whenever they are discussed most of us automatically switch off. I admit to falling into that trap when it comes to financial matters. It's a defense mechanism but has become a dangerous myth that prevents people from engaging in and understanding the world we live in. 

Røislien is certainly not the stereotype "stats nerd". He happens to be a major TV personality in Norway thanks to his successful popular science TV series on Norwegian TV, NRK, Kampen om livet. The programme deals with difficult subjects like medical science, statistical analysis and molecular biology, but has become so popular thanks to its use of story-telling and eye-catching experiments rather than going into scientific detail. It's a classic case of  getting people to see the subject in a new light, to awake interest by seeing connections with things we understand (or think we do). In advertising terms it's not about selling the sausages, it's about selling the sizzle. 

He talked about the need for teachers and scientists to find compelling storylines to raise public interest in their subjects illustrated by his struggle to sell his idea of a documentary series to the TV company. As educators, it's not enough to deliver the facts, we need to break down people's barriers to learning, to activate curiosity and bring those facts to life. A good story helps us to remember and motivates us to find out how the story ends. We need more compelling stories to promote education and inspire curiosity. 

At the same time, I can't help noticing that not all stories are positive and that one reason for the growth of populism and conspiracy theories lies in the power of the stories they concoct. Even if they are shown to be misleading, the stories are stronger than the facts. Many traditional political parties have failed to realise the power of story telling, for better or for worse. Of course, the myth that subjects like maths are boring is also a compelling story, leading me back to the start of this post. 

Mind your language - the problems of English as default

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English is the default language of international communication but at the same time this puts native speakers in an extremely privileged position. Most international conferences feature keynotes by native English speakers and these voices tend to be prominent in most workshops and seminar sessions. Those whose command of English is less than perfect tend to sit quietly and listen. It would be interesting to see a study of whether active participation is directly linked to confidence in English. Even those whose English is extremely proficient may have trouble understanding the native speakers who often use idioms  or jokes and cultural references that only native speakers will be familiar with. I have often listened to speeches and wondered if anyone else in the hall understood the highly culturally specific reference made by the speaker. It's not enough to simply be proficient at English, you need to learn an entire culture.

This is illustrated by the opening of an article in KQED, Tower Of Babble: Nonnative Speakers Navigate The World Of 'Good' And 'Bad' English.

Picture this: A group of nonnative English speakers is in a room. There are people from Germany, Singapore, South Korea, Nigeria and France. They're having a great time speaking to each other in English, and communication is smooth. And then an American walks into the room. The American speaks quickly, using esoteric jargon ("let's take a holistic approach") and sports idioms ("you hit it out of the park!"). And the conversation trickles to a halt.

I've had similar experiences when I was learning Swedish many years ago. We non-native speakers could have very good discussions because we had all learned the same vocabulary and grammar, but when a Swede entered the conversation we suddenly got tongue-tied. They used expressions we didn't recognise and spoke so quickly. No-one wanted to reveal their limitations. 

The article gives several examples of how non-native speakers can be excluded or marginalised and the main point is that native speakers should learn to adapt their language to the audience they are speaking to. This doesn't mean simplifying, but being able to recognise idioms and references that the audience cannot be expected to grasp. English speakers who have never tried to learn another language are often insensitive to this and often speak as they would to their colleagues at home not realising how they are failing to connect with the audience.

The tests that non-native English speakers need to pass to gain access to international work are also unfairly discriminatory according to the article. They test a very particular form of English and people who have an excellent command of the language for the work they do can fail tests like the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) because they haven't grasped the finer points of written academic English or indeed the differences between American and British English.

The test also requires making a clear choice between British and American spelling and vocabulary. That "can trip up people whose English comes from various sources" — say, a third from British textbooks and two-thirds from American movies.

Indeed, the differences between American and British English are becoming increasingly blurred especially in the UK where American media and culture are so prevalent. I'm sure you'll find a mix of the two in my writing. Is this worth testing today? What matters if whether the candidate has the level of English to do their job. According to Lithuanian journalist Daiva Repečkaitė:

"As the pandemic rages," she said, "I worry that there might be countless refugee doctors and nurses who just haven't read enough Shakespeare or haven't practiced enough multiple-choice, fill-in exercises to pass these tests in English-speaking countries." Especially at a time when the burden of COVID-19 weighs heavily on the world, Repečkaitė says, we all suffer when skilled professionals like doctors are prevented from helping people.

Linguistic integration is a two-way process and native speakers need to learn to adapt their language in international contexts. Avoid unnecessary idioms, references and jokes, speak a little more slowly and clearly and your message will be clear. Otherwise the audience may still give polite applause but they will not have understood your message. 

Drowning in content but what we need is community

CC0 Image created by Catherine Cordasco by @unitednations on Unsplash

Over the past year teachers all over the world have recorded and stored millions of videos, from short instructions to long lectures. Most of them can only be used once but are seldom deleted and as a result many institutions' servers are bursting with terabytes of video content. Storage is not as cheap as many think and as servers fill up we need to think of ways to free up space for more valuable content. Many institutions including my own compress and save seldom used content in archives but as production levels continue to mushroom we need to start asking why we need to produce all this. Why do teachers put so much time and effort into content production? 

One obvious solution is sharing such material as OER (open educational resources) and allowing others to reuse and adapt the material. Why record a lecture when there are hundreds of similar lectures already freely available? I'm sure you can be a good teacher without ever recording a lecture of your own and spending time focusing on facilitation, tutorials and feedback. But sadly OER has still not become mainstream despite greater awareness, according to a American recent survey reported by Campus technology, Faculty Awareness of OER Has Increased for 5 Years Straight, Yet Adoption Is Flat.

While OER awareness went up, for the first time in the past decade, adoption of OER as required course materials did not increase. Why? The researchers hypothesized that with last year's pandemic-induced shift from face-to-face to online instruction, faculty time was monopolized by pedagogical concerns. "[Flat OER adoption rates] may have been the result of the considerable amounts of time faculty had to put into converting their courses, leaving them no time to invest in the exploration and evaluation of new materials,"

Teachers feel bound by tradition to deliver content and the students expect the teacher to deliver content and it's very hard to escape from this mindset. Even if we know there is open content available we feel that we are not doing our job if we use other's material. If it's fine to recommend other people's books and articles it should be okay to recommend their recorded lectures.

This is reinforced in a recent article by David Kellermann in Times Higher Education, Academics aren’t content creators, and it’s regressive to make them so. The pandemic has forced everyone to become video editors and generally not very good ones.

Suddenly academics became video editors – mostly bad ones – and our students turned to YouTube, because on YouTube you can get a better explanation of the same thing (for free I might add). Universities turned from communities of learning and collaboration into B-grade content providers. This is the death march of higher education. Universities are not content providers. Somewhere along this unplanned journey we lost our way.

The main point of this article is that instead of producing vast volumes of content that already exist the university should focus on creating communities, providing context rather than content. The campus itself creates a sense of belonging with spaces that facilitate meetings, discussions and networking as well as having a strong identity in its architecture and setting. The article quotes Eli Noam: the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community. 

Today's online spaces lack these advantages and tend to be a collection of closed silos. The lessons of the pandemic must include the need to develop more social, interactive and engaging digital spaces that can complement the campus spaces. The endless production of video content is a distraction from this crucial challenge.

Hybrid teaching - the new normal or yet another stress factor?

"Spinning" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by lissalou66

As universities prepare for a post-pandemic future, there is a lot of discussion about hybrid or even hyflex teaching where classes are held both on campus and online and students are able to choose how they wish to access the class. Hyflex even includes the option of being able to participate completely asynchronously but with exactly the same learning outcomes and examination requirements. It sounds great but doing this well will demand considerable effort and there are many pitfalls to beware of. Few classrooms are equipped for hybrid teaching for a start. Many institutions have already started converting classrooms for greater flexibility, generally involving the purchase of multiple screens, microphones, cameras and other hardware, much to the delight of the tech industry.

The idea of offering greater flexibility to students is fine but there are also dangers of taking a simplistic approach to a complex issue. Hybrid teaching is nothing new and many institutions have been doing it for years. It works relatively well for traditional large-scale lecturing since the students are largely passive regardless of location. The problems emerge when you add more interactivity. The classroom students then tend to dominate the discussion sessions and online students are often reduced to passive spectators since they are not as visible and it is hard to get the teacher's attention. Managing group work both in class and online is quite demanding on the teacher, especially if you want to have mixed campus and online groups. 

This all adds to the stress levels of already overstretched teachers after the past year's intensive pivot to online education, discussed in an article by teacher Amanda White in Times Higher Education, Upskill fatigue: will hybrid and hyflex tip academics over the edge? Despite her experience in online education, she admits that the past year has been very tiring and is worried that poorly implemented hybrid solutions will put even greater burdens on teachers. New teaching methods and skills will be required to ensure pedagogical quality and avoid falling into the trap of simply offering dual mode lecturing. Some institutions will be able to install expensive technology and provide essential support for their use but most will not, leaving teachers to rely on their multitasking skills, or lack of them.

While hybrid may seem like a panacea for the educational limbo we find ourselves in, implementing it poorly as a stopgap measure is likely to cause our educators more harm than good. Having educators without adequate training, learning design assistance, facilities and workload support is likely to pave the way for activities that do not engage the class, leaving online students cut adrift as observers.

Large lecture-based classes, often for first year students, are a tempting area for hybrid adaptation and Tony Bates warns against this in a new post, Teaching large lecture classes online in the fall? He advises universities to take the chance to change the model of teaching first year students and simply drop the large-scale lecture format except for a few exceptional occasions. Instead of lecturing, teachers need to help students find the information themselves and assess it.

When an instructor prepares a lecture, at least in first year, they are often doing work that the students could be doing: searching for information, raising issues, making a strong case or argument, coming to conclusions. These are skills that students increasingly need to develop themselves.

He also suggests that many first year classes could be smaller allowing for more collaborative group work and a teacher role more focused on facilitation and tutoring. If that is not possible then a more interactive and collaborative approach can be applied by a better use of prerecorded shorter lectures and a focus on asynchronous collaboration in the learning management system. In all cases we need to redesign our courses and review what technology we need. 

Without substantial re-design, moving large lectures online will increase the workload and stress on instructors, and/or will lead to poorer results for students. So now is the time for administrators and Deans to start asking whether we should be moving the large lecture classes online, or instead, finding better ways to deal with first year courses.

So should campus teaching become hybrid by default and if so, how do we deal with practical workshops, lab sessions and so on? I think we need to look carefully at which spaces to use for different types of activity. Sometimes we will have to insist on students coming to campus for essential hands-on training in fields like medicine, engineering, visual arts, music etc. Flexibility is fine but in some cases it can be dangerous and students need to be aware that although they can study online for some of the course there will be obligatory on-site training. At the same time we will definitely move to more hybrid solutions but they will demand course redesign and professional development for teachers if they are going to succeed.

Hooked on lecturing?

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Even if we know that lecturing is not a very effective way of teaching, it is so hard to stop doing it. I find myself often in the absurd position of lecturing about why we need to move away from lecturing and every time I fall into the trap I promise to be better next time. My excuse is that people ask me to lecture so that's what I do. The problem is that I do enjoy it and I think I do it quite well and that makes it even harder to kick the habit. Sometimes I think I have made the session open to discussion and tried to stimulate interaction, but afterwards I realise in shame that it was 90% monologue, again. Of course I also run workshops and use lots of tools and methods to increase interaction but I keep falling back into traditional formats. How to escape from an irresistible force?

When educators get together in conferences and seminars we tend to give lectures on research work or methodology with pretty traditional questions-and-answers sessions. I once attended a conference on innovative pedagogy that consisted of many long and rather dull lectures from experts in the field. There are exceptions, but we seem to have great difficulty escaping the gravitational pull of tradition. It's what people expect teachers to do, especially at university, and it's so easy to oblige. A well-structured and lively lecture can be inspiring but the majority fall short. We try to throw in a few polls or buzz group discussions but in the end it's still a lecture.

Do you have this problem or have you managed to do a lecture detox? When you get an invitation to give a lecture at a big conference what do you say? 

Illusions of learning - the problem with student evaluations

"students_lecture_event" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by University of Minnesota Duluth

One of the problems with asking students to evaluate their courses and teachers is that the surveys often focus on a false customer-supplier relationship. In the commercial sphere companies want to find out if their customers are happy with what they have bought and this indicates a successful transaction. But education is far more complex and is not simply a matter of giving the customers what they want. In many cases the effects of education are delayed and cannot be assessed at the end of a course in terms of customer satisfaction. If you think back to your own education you may admit that the best teacher you had was one you hated at the time. A teacher who demanded a lot, criticised you, pushed you and challenged you. After the course you would have handed in a scathing evaluation but now, years later, you realise that you learned so much more from that experience than from the friendly teachers who made life easy and gave you a good grade.

We ask students to evaluate our pedagogy without helping them understand the process and this results in rather superficial evaluations that say very little about how much they actually learned from the course. This is the topic of a fascinating article in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, On Students’ (Mis)judgments of Learning and Teaching Effectiveness. Sadly this article is only available if your employer pays a subscription for access to the journal but I will try to convey the gist of it here.

The authors discuss at length what they call illusions of learning. In their studies they discovered that students tend to give positive reviews to teachers who are enthusiastic and provide easily digested material that helps them pass the tests; an understandably pragmatic approach. They base their evaluations on superficial elements such as the teachers' appearance, age, gender, accent, enthusiasm, presentation style, and use of digital tools, none of which have any real relevance for the student's learning. Furthermore, the students showed a clear preference for traditional teaching methods like lecturing and believe that the learn more from traditional teaching than from active and collaborative learning, even when test results suggest the opposite.

Students believe, for example, that they learn best from enthusiastic and engaging instructors who provide smooth and well-polished lectures that do not require active class participation. Such factors, although they readily inflate students’ judgments of their own learning, do not consistently enhance students’ actual learning. They also inflate students’ evaluations of the effectiveness of their instructors. Indeed, students’ evaluations of teaching effectiveness can be poor predictors of their actual learning in their courses, and these evaluations can be biased by external factors unrelated to student learning, such as an instructor's gender, age, attractiveness, and grading leniency.

One section of the article has the heading: Do Student Evaluations Incentivize Poor Teaching Practices? If the university gives too much weight to student evaluations then more challenging teaching methods will be discouraged in favour of strategies that enhance customer satisfaction. Teachers who push and challenge students and encourage them to investigate topics for themselves risk poor evaluations and possible reprimand. To get better evaluations, teachers will be encouraged to revert to traditional methods and we are then stuck in a vicious circle. The students will have the illusion of learning and the teachers will have the illusion of teaching. Everyone will be happy but how much have they learned?

We propose that faulty metacognition is a key contributor to the problem. Students’ misevaluations of teaching effectiveness can be driven by the same factors that underlie their misjudgments of their own learning. Although they do not enhance student learning and can even impair it, teaching approaches that minimize effort and create the appearance of a smooth, well-polished, fluent, and enthusiastic instructor readily boost students’ subjective impressions of what they have learned and their perceived effectiveness of that instructor. Because these subjective impressions are the primary basis for determining teaching effectiveness, and as such are a key metric used for decisions about hiring and promotion, instructors are currently incentivized to adopt teaching approaches that may produce illusions of learning that boost their ratings but can actually undermine students’ learning.

Sadly there is no easy solution to this problem except widening the scope of evaluations to include multiple perspectives and helping students to make more informed evaluations of their learning. Given the workload for many students this will not be easy and the authors see no clear solution at present. At least we now have evidence that the system requires a radical rethink and that awareness is an improvement.

It is hoped that future conceptualizations of teaching effectiveness include research-based evidence for improving student learning and metacognition as a strong basis in formulating measurements that accurately and reliably reflect the quality of teaching.

Reference

Carpenter, S. K., et al. On Students’ (Mis)judgments of Learning and Teaching Effectiveness. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.12.009

The illusion of learning - from lectures to active learning

"Active Learning Space 333" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by queensu

If you look back to your school and university days you sometimes realise that the demanding and tough teachers you disliked so much at the time actually taught you more than the ones you liked. Activities that were challenging and uncomfortable at the time were with hindsight much greater learning experiences than more orthodox classroom methods. In short, we are not very good at recognising a learning experience. This puts into question the validity of student course evaluations where challenging teachers and activities are often given low scores.

This discrepancy is studied in an article in the Harvard gazette, Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think. Many studies show that students appreciate lectures and see them as valuable learning experiences whereas they are often more skeptical to active, collaborative learning. The Harvard study compared student attitudes to traditional lectures with active learning classrooms and showed that although the students rated the lectures more highly, the test results showed that they actually learned more by active learning. A well-structured and professional lecture can be very enjoyable and create the illusion that you have learned a lot. But, of course, the learning happens when you start grappling with the issues yourself and with colleagues. The collaborative element is less clear-cut than the crisp lecture format and involves messy problem-solving and negotiation. We may not realise how much we have learned till much later. According to the lead author of the study, Louis Deslauriers:

“Deep learning is hard work. The effort involved in active learning can be misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning,” he said. “On the other hand, a superstar lecturer can explain things in such a way as to make students feel like they are learning more than they actually are.”

The lecture is still a symbol of higher education and in popular culture any reference to universities inevitably shows a lecture hall filled with students eagerly making notes on the professor's lecture. Students still expect university to be like this and are often disappointed if they don't have any lectures on a course. A good lecture can indeed act as an inspiration and a starting point for investigation but it is in the messy process of negotiation, meaning-making and problem-solving that the real learning takes place.

... the study shows that it’s important to ensure that neither instructors nor students are fooled into thinking that lectures are the best learning option. “Students might give fabulous evaluations to an amazing lecturer based on this feeling of learning, even though their actual learning isn’t optimal,” he said. “This could help to explain why study after study shows that student evaluations seem to be completely uncorrelated with actual learning.”

The key lies in helping students realise the value of active learning by explaining the process and introducing the methods step by step. At the same time it is a major step in the dark for many teachers who are justly proud of their ability to lecture and get excellent evaluations from doing so. Why change a winning formula that the students clearly appreciate? There's a chain reaction here where teachers need support to adapt to a new teaching method and the students in turn need support to adapt and learn to appreciate the new method.

Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom
Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, Greg Kestin
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2019, 201821936; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1821936116

What is a lecture worth?

"WIDER Annual Lecture 20: Direct interven" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by UNU-WIDER

Today you can watch millions of university lectures in all disciplines completely free and in many cases download them to your mobile or tablet. In addition, many universities offer course content as open courseware. For the past 15 years we have seen that content is no longer king and since it is openly available for free the real value of a university lies in providing the context through teachers who can lead discussions, put issues into perspective, inspire, challenge and support their students. However most institutions still protect their content, locking it away from public view, as if it was a valuable commodity. Of course there is content that may be sensitive but since so many universities in the world are state funded it seems strange to hide content that has been publicly funded.

An article by Joshua Kim in Inside Higher Ed, An Incredible College Lecture Is Now Worth 40 Cents, highlights this issue through the example of an online course on the history of London. This course is not open or free but the cost says something about the value of even high quality content.

I purchased this course from the Amazon owned Audible.com. As a Platinum Annual subscriber, the cost for the course was $9.56. The course has 24 lectures of about 30 minutes each. The cost per lecture, therefore, is about 40 cents. 40 cents.

Despite the line-up of leading authorities in the field and high quality production the course price is extremely low. Even in a commercial setting the price is 40 cents per lecture. Of course if you take a MOOC or other open course the cost is precisely zero. At the same time quality content is extremely valuable for the learner in terms of their learning and is also expensive to create. I'm not sure how sustainable this model is and in the end we may see a system whereby micro-payments per user can finance content production in some way. Those who produce good content deserve some reward and incentive to continue.

However in a world where so much content is free and often licensed for reuse and adaptation then why do so many institutions still spend so much time and money on making their own content? If content is easily shared then institutions can reuse and adapt content at low cost and focus their attention on adding real value in terms of fostering learning and supporting students. Do many universities still base their courses on content delivery and their examinations on content recall? Shouldn't teachers be encouraged to use more open content and spend their own time helping students to make sense of them? Kim ends his article with these two questions:

Is your school transitioning from a teacher/content focus to a learner/learning focus?

How do we keep what is wonderful about the lecture format, but fold in elements of active and relational learning in to the DNA of higher education?

Projectors and microphones - devices we just can't get used to

"Projector fail" (CC BY 2.0) by preetamrai

No matter how digital we may be today there are some devices that we don't seem to ever come to terms with.

My first example is the projector. At every conference or meeting I attend someone has problems with these deceptively simple devices and sometimes these problems can escalate into lengthy battles as the audience murmurs sympathetically and knowingly in the background. We've all been there. You have your slides ready, connect the laptop to the projector but nothing happens ... no signal detected.  Even hardened tech professionals can be reduced to looking like embarrassed novices when confronted with a cranky projector. Projectors are totally unpredictable creatures who can be affectionate and happy one minute and then suddenly act as if they've never seen you before. They tend to be faithful to only certain devices and bitter enemies to all the rest and they really take objection to newcomers. Most conferences therefore play safe and insist on uploading all presentations to a computer that they know the projector will trust. Anyone who tries to plug in an outsider simply gets what's coming to them. If you're just going to show a slideshow then that's fine but if you're going to log into different web services and tools during your session it's very complex doing so on a strange device that may object to the sites you try to log into and your own device just works seamlessly. Even when you do make contact with the projector it nearly always chooses a bizarre screen resolution that means that my screen appears in magnified format and you need to play around with various controls to get something that the audience can see properly.

If I was asked to be counsel for the defense, I would probably build my case on how difficult it is for a poor simple projector to adapt to the myriad of settings and applications that people have on their devices. Older projectors simply can't keep up with the pace of chance and maybe it's unrealistic to expect them to do so. However, I do wish we could find a way for laptops and projectors to understand each other a little better.

My other example is the microphone. Here there are two issues: the device itself and our attitudes towards them. Wireless microphones have a habit of running out of battery power in the middle of a session or there's some loose connection somewhere that cuts off the sound at regular intervals. If there's no reserve device close at hand this can result in major interruptions and irritation. This problem is of course easy to remedy with good preparation. The other, trickier issue is people's extreme reluctance to use microphones at all. Even if the venue has microphones ready to use there are always speakers who ask the rhetorical question, "I don't need a microphone do I?" and the audience seldom objects. However those whose hearing is not 100% will seldom raise an objection even if they can hardly hear what is being said. If we are serious about inclusion in education the default should be to use a microphone. It doesn't hurt and everyone can hear you.

I admit that headsets can be awkward to put on but do it before you start and you'll be fine. Handheld microphones are trickier and you need to hold them close to your mouth. I've seen so many speakers gesticulating with their microphone hand or holding the mike too far from the mouth and so only the front rows can hear them at all. But with a bit of concentration and a positive attitude it works well and everyone can hear you. Let's see microphones as inclusive technology and use them better.

Lectures as performance

"The Stage" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by overseastom

The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.

This quote, generally attributed to one of my favourite authors Albert Camus (though I can't find what work it is taken from after about twenty minutes of searching), is often used by those who want to scrap the traditional lecture and replace it with more active forms of learning where the teacher facilitates and mediates rather than being the headline act. The global stereotype of higher education is of the gigantic lecture hall filled with students and the brilliant professor on the stage. It's what many students expect and what a lot of institutions still try to provide though most lectures fall far short of the ideal. Lectures are popular because they are easy to produce, can be delivered to large groups of students and are based on the view of education as consumption of content. But today many institutions are moving towards pedagogical models that focus on active learning, co-creation and collaboration and the physical landscape of the university is changing rapidly as more and more active learning spaces replace the old lecture halls and fixed-desk classrooms. Some universities have gone as far as to scrap the lecture hall completely though they continue to produce them in a digital format on their media platforms.

However, I believe that the lecture still has an important role to play in education as long as it is used wisely and sparingly. That was reinforced for me after reading an article by Michael Merrifield in Times Higher Education, University lecturers should be engaging raconteurs, claiming that the value of a lecture is in terms of its ability to engage and inspire and as such the lecturer must be, above all, a storyteller, a performance artist. It's not about going through the facts and theories that can be read in a book or article, it's about building a narrative that will inspire, provoke thought and challenge the audience.

So what is the point of a lecture? To be honest, I think it is something rather simple. It is to impart knowledge the lecturer currently has but the students do not, through a narrative that is more entertaining than reading the same material out of a book. So, when lecturing, I am not a sage on a stage, a phrase that is clearly intended as deprecating as well as being conveniently alliterative. I am, hopefully, an entertaining storyteller, which also sounds deprecating, but I don’t think it is.

Maybe lectures are about creating illusions but not in the sense implicit in the quote at the beginning of this post. The secret to a good lecture is creating the illusion of a compelling narrative, where you teach ideas and concepts by weaving them into a story with elements of surprise, suspense and inquisitive engagement. The lecture should be an event rather than an everyday ritual and as such it can be a very valuable teaching tool but only when well planned and delivered with enthusiasm. If you want to lecture then you need to ask yourself these questions:

• Are you sure that a lecture is the best way to engage the learners in this topic? 
• How can I engage them in my narrative? e.g. short teaser video/quiz to stimulate interest before the lecture, interaction using digital tools, short buzzgroup activities, creating suspense, use of props.
• What happens after the lecture? Is there a (digital) space for reflection, questions, follow-up work?

Your enthusiasm and ability to communicate effectively can make all the difference. Above all, make it unmissable! 

The complexity of the flipped classroom

"reflections" (CC BY 2.0) by siaronj

Like many popular concepts, the flipped classroom model suffers from having a catchy name that invites over-simplification and the aura of being some kind of miracle cure. The idea of devoting classroom time to active learning and discussion rather than passive consumption is not new but the flipped classroom is about the application of digital media to offer pre-recorded lectures, demonstrations and instructions as preparation for the classroom collaboration. Flipping means that some content delivery is delivered asynchronously and that synchronous meetings focus on applying that information and developing skills.

One over-simplification is that the method is simply about teachers prerecording all input in video format. I would say that some content should still be delivered live since there is often a need for direct contact and the teacher is able to modify the delivery if the class seems confused. There is nothing wrong with a well-delivered and engaging lecture as long as it isn't an everyday occurrence. Similarly there is nothing in the rule book that says that the teacher has to record all the videos; there is a wealth of open educational resources that are free to use. Getting input from a variety of sources can widen the scope of the lesson and open students' eyes to different interpretations of the same topic. Audio input can also be used since it's easier to record and easier to listen to on a mobile device. You can even flip the classroom by asking students to read and reflect on a text! Basically the flipped classroom is just a snappy headline for a more complex process; developing a student-oriented approach to teaching and learning, helping students to move from consumption to active collaborative learning.

This complexity is discussed in a new special issue of the journal Education Sciences, The Flipped Classroom in Higher Education: Research and Practice. One of the articles, by Shawn R. Simonson, To Flip or Not to Flip: What Are the Questions? looks at barriers to flipping the classroom and, with reference to previous research, sees the following factors:

Situational factor examples were content coverage expectations, department norms, and infrastructure. Illustrations of instructor factors were time constraints, lack of experience, and preferred teaching methods. Student factors were responsibility, intention, motivation, and resistance.

Simonson presents a table to help teachers decide when or not to flip, taking all these factors into consideration. If the course and examination are heavily based on content delivery then the flipped classroom may not be very effective since the students will be focused on learning as much of the content as possible and the examination method rewards the demonstration of content mastery. This could be the case in basic courses in, say, medicine where students need to learn essential facts that underpin the rest of the degree programme. Another barrier is if traditional lecturing is the institutional norm then teachers will be reluctant to risk trying out new methods. To successfully flip the classroom teachers need time, support and resources and a poorly implemented version can have negative consequences for all concerned. Similarly if students expect to be fed with the facts they need to learn to pass the exam, then the flipped classroom model may cause frustration and increased stress since it generally demands more time and effort. 

The introductory article of the special issue, Flipped Classroom Research: From “Black Box” to “White Box” Evaluation, by Christian Stöhr and Tom Adawia of Chalmers university of technology, proposes a more nuanced approach to evaluating interventions, realist evaluation. This involves asking the following questions:

• For whom will the intervention work and not work, and why? 
• In what contexts will the intervention work and not work, and why?
• What are the main mechanisms by which we expect the intervention to work?
• If the intervention works, what outcomes will we see?

These questions should guide any teacher thinking of adopting a flipped classroom approach, or any new approach for that matter. Instead of rushing towards a new promising model we need to have these questions in mind and be able to adjust our practice as our exploratory attempts develop. The flipped classroom is one of many options available to teachers and the skill is deciding which methods best match the desired outcomes. Simonson's conclusion sums up the complexity that lies behind the flipped classroom.

Thus, the instructor who is considering flipping the classroom should contemplate the course content and at what level they want their students to understand that content. The situation in which they teach is important as external expectations and resources can make flipping the classroom more or less challenging. Motivating and appropriately challenging students is also critical and worthy of reflection. Perhaps most importantly, the instructor needs to determine their own willingness and ability to change pedagogies. Only when the complex interplay of these factors has been considered can a balanced decision be made and the learner-centered environment optimized.

Lecture capture and attendance

CC0 Public domain by Nikolayhg on Pixabay

Despite considerable criticism over the years, the good old lecture is still the staple diet on most of the world's campuses and shows few signs of disappearing in the near future. It's quite simply so embedded into the culture of higher education that students would probably feel cheated if they didn't get the experience of sitting in a large hall listening to a professor's words of wisdom. Even students who have been to schools that have embraced collaborative learning and the pedagogical use of digital tools and devices somehow expect university to be different and the traditional image of the lecture is what they expect.

Lectures are easy to arrange and plan and seem to be an effective way of addressing a large group of first or second year students at the same time. They are also usually the first teaching method to be made digital since lecture capture is relatively simple to do and it doesn't really change the status quo except for the question of whether students will bother to come to the lectures if they know that a recording will be available. However a new study from the University of Aberdeen, Turn up, tune in, don’t drop out: The relationship between lecture attendance, use of lecture recordings, and achievement at different levels of study, shows that these fears are not justified and that recorded lectures have very little effect on student attendance and they have a positive effect on many students' learning (or at least their test scores). The study shows that the recordings are particularly helpful as study aids for first year students and that they are especially appreciated by non-native English speakers who get the chance to go through the lecture at their own pace.

Importantly, despite anecdotal fears,we find little evidence to substantiate the claim that providing recordings reduces attendance or negatively impacts achievement, instead, we find positive evidence that the recordings are seen as particularly helpful for non-native speakers in first year as they adjust to a new language environment.

Lecture recordings were of less importance to students in their third and fourth years, presumably because the focus there is not so much on learning fundamental principles and facts and more on deeper learning. The study will hopefully calm the fears that many teachers have about letting students have access to their lectures either in recorded form or at least as slideshows or text summaries. These are valuable to students' learning and more importantly are an essential accessibility feature, allowing students with special needs to review material in the form they prefer.

However the real issue here is the value of lectures as synchronous activities. One-way communication like this should be prerecorded and made available to students before the scheduled class activity. The classroom session should then be as interactive as possible, making the session effectively unmissable. First year students especially need more time for deeper discussion, inquiry and collaboration and valuable contact time should not be wasted on monologue, no matter how knowledgeable the teacher may be. Occasional traditional lectures can certainly be inspiring but only when the speaker is an excellent presenter. Otherwise let's provide good prerecorded input for students, preferably in short bite-sized chunks of around 10 minutes, together with quizzes or questions for discussion and free up classroom time for activity.

Read more on this in an article in The Learning Scientists blog, Lecture Attendance, Lecture Recordings, and Student Performance: A Complex, but Noteworthy Relationship.

Reference
Nordmann, E., Calder, C., Bishop, P., Irwin, A., & Comber, D. (2017, November 10). Turn up, tune in, don’t drop out: The relationship between lecture attendance, use of lecture recordings, and achievement at different levels of study. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/fd3yj

Students and educational technology - it's complicated

"Lessons from the Mathboard" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Bernie Goldbach

A recurring narrative in educational technology is that students are driving the change. They are using the creative and collaborative opportunities offered by today's social media and demanding that universities and faculty do the same. This is used as a powerful argument by edtech companies when selling their solutions. This narrative is strongly linked to the idea of students as digital natives and is often the reason for institutions rushing head first into hasty and largely unplanned technology projects. No one wants to appear out of touch with student demands and so major technology projects are launched without first discussing the pedagogical implications and how the technology can be used to enhance teaching and learning. Of course students are using digital tools and arenas in their learning but not as widely and proficiently as the edtech narrative claims.

But are students really demanding change? My own experience leads me to question this to a certain extent. Furthermore, digital literacy is not a simple generation issue but more about whether or not a person is interested in the use of technology. Many students are highly proficient at using digital devices and social media for socialising and entertainment but are unaware of how to use them for work and learning. It would be extremely dangerous to assume that all students are proficient at information retrieval, source criticism, collaborative learning and media skills and most institutions are now integrating these soft skills into all parts of the curriculum. However, this change is not due to student demand but due to teachers becoming aware that these skills are missing and taking action to remedy the gaps.

Sometimes students can be more conservative than faculty and this issue is raised in an article in EdSurge, What If Students Are the Biggest Barrier to Innovation? Even if many students have used a wide range of digital tools and learning spaces in their high school years, whenever they arrive on campus they are told that university is different. Students are generally very pragmatic; they want to get their grades and then a degree in the most efficient way possible. They will adapt to whatever the institution demands. They also have the traditional image of university in their heads and are disappointed if their experience doesn't match it.

... the “metaphor” of the old and wise professor pouring knowledge into students through class lectures is what many graduate students expect. When they don’t get that experience because they are forced to do group work and interact with peers (who they do not view as subject-matter experts), they don’t feel like they are learning.

“I have had students tell me. I am not paying to listen to my neighbor's thoughts, I am paying to hear you,” says Pickett.

This is reinforced by the vocabulary of higher education so if we call the teachers lecturers and the lessons are called lectures then a lecture is naturally what the students expect. Teachers who focus on student-centred learning and concepts such as collaborative learning, flipped classroom, problem-based learning and so on risk negative evaluations from students who expect to be fed with wisdom and knowledge. Expectations, tradition and attitudes are major barriers to change and cannot be overcome simply by logical argument, no matter how much research evidence is available.

I would say that the main drivers of change in terms of educational technology are teachers who are using the technology successfully, often due to a desire to widen their professional skills and a genuine interest in pedagogical innovation. The problem is, however, that many of these teachers have developed their digital skills on their own initiative, usually outside working hours. This ad hoc approach means that teachers' digital skills are not evenly distributed and there is often an alarming digital divide within the teaching staff of most institutions.

This inconsistency is a concern for many students as discussed in an article from JISC in the UK, It’s official - higher education students want staff to be better with digital, not to use more of it. Students in this national survey state clearly that they want all staff to be trained in using digital tools and demand more consistent use of technology rather than more variety.

Don’t allow academic staff to pick their own ways of using digital resources. At the moment each academic uses the virtual learning environment (VLE) in a different way, making it very time consuming to keep switching approaches. It’s also obvious that academic staff have not received adequate training in using these systems.

They are not demanding more technology but a more strategic approach to technology use and fewer bottom-up ad hoc initiatives. Interestingly the survey reveals a concern that online learning lacks a face-to-face element and a fear that more technology means less classroom contact with teachers.

However, when asked what their institution should do and not do, students requested a better use of digital systems, not more, fearing it could be used to replace face-to-face time with staff.

What seems to be missing here is a realisation that online collaboration is an essential skill in many companies and organisations today and that this skill must be developed at university and integrated into all programmes. Sadly online work is still seen as a substitute for "real" contact instead of a valuable skill in itself.

The conclusion is that technology can enhance teaching and learning but to succeed it needs to be explained and introduced gradually. Both teachers and students need to change their perspectives and this takes time. Above all the process requires skilled management and leadership and only when all these conditions are fulfilled will we see successful implementation and integration of technology in education.

The choreography of lectures

"Prof Iain Stewart in Allam Lecture Theat" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by Science and Engineering - University of Hull

Despite all the studies and articles about the inefficiency of lecturing we seem to be addicted to the habit. I freely admit that I don't always practice what I preach but the format and location of most conferences make the traditional lecture almost unavoidable. It's rather amusing how many conferences I've attended on subjects like innovative pedagogy or future learning spaces that are based almost exclusively around lectures and the dreaded panel debates. Indeed I've listened to extremely boring lectures about innovative pedagogy.

So if we have to continue giving presentations, how can we lighten them up just a bit? The crucial success factors are of course enthusiasm for your subject and the ability to show an interest in the audience (eye contact, smiles, rhetorical questions etc). Talk to the audience, not at them. However probably most discussed feature of presentations is the question of whether or not to use slideshows. I'm always very wary of speakers who go "unplugged" and present without visual aids. Although there are a few genuine orators who can keep an audience's attention simply by the power of their narrative, the vast majority who try this tactic fail. Without the visual support the presentation becomes aimless and there are seldom any clues on how long it is going to last, what the objectives are or what the common theme is. It's all too easy to lose your audience..

I think we need to consider the choreography of a presentation. Even if it is largely a monologue it can vary in pace, deliver styles and types of interaction. Whether it's PowerPoint or Prezi doesn't really matter much in my opinion but the important factor is how they support your message. Far too many speakers still overload their slides with far too much text in an honest desire to provide as much information/value as possible but forgetting that there is a limit to how much an audience can absorb. Cognitive overload is a common problem and can be resolved by not talking when people need to read and not showing text when people are expected to listen. Use the slides to reinforce the structure of your presentation through keywords and images and provide the details orally. If you do have important information on a slide why not pause to let everyone read it before providing the details? Ask the audience to discuss the issue in pairs for a minute or so or simply ask a question for short silent reflection.

An article in Inside Higher Ed, A 50% Content / Discussion Formula for Academic Presentations presents a possible solution to turning presentations into discussions; cutting the input quota of your presentation to 50% and using the rest of the time for discussion. Very seldom is there much time for discussion even if that is what we value most at a conference.

Certainly, this 50 percent formula certainly is not the norm for academic presentations. Most academic presentations leave little time for discussion. Content takes up most of the time. Most often, the presenter is rushing to get through all the content that she has planned to present.  Sometimes discussion between the presenter and the audience does happen during the presentation, but that is rare. The larger the audience the less likely there is to be an integrated presentation / discussion format.

The author points out quite rightly that when there is time for questions from the audience it can often be counter-productive. Most questions are not even questions and some participants even take the opportunity to start their own alternative lecture. Question sessions generally fail because they can only accommodate a handful of participants at best, normally those who are most vocal. The majority are still silent.

One way around this could be to finish early and then pose 1-3 questions arising from your talk. Ask the audience to discuss in small groups and post their ideas and questions on a common document (like Google Docs) or workspace (like Padlet). For the last five minutes you can project the results on the screen, comment on some of them and promise to answer the rest later in the day. That way everyone gets to discuss your ideas, ask questions and provide new insights without the awkwardness of the usual plenum questions session.

By paying more attention to the choreography of a lecture we may be able to get more out of it.