Bligh, 2000<\/a><\/p>\n This specific definition is important as it excludes contexts where a lecture is deliberately designed to be interrupted by questions or discussion between instructors and students.\u00a0This form of more interactive lecturing will be discussed\u00a0in the next section (Chapter 3, Section 4<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n Transmissive lectures can be traced\u00a0back as far as ancient Greek and Roman times, and certainly from at least the start of the European university, in the 13th century. The term 'lecture' comes from the Latin, meaning a reading. In the 13th century, most books were extremely rare. They were painstakingly handcrafted and illustrated by monks, often from fragments or collections of earlier and exceedingly rare and valuable scrolls from ancient Greek or Roman times, or were translated from Arabic sources, since\u00a0much documentation was destroyed in Europe\u00a0during the Dark Ages following the fall of the Roman empire. As a result,\u00a0a university would often have only one copy of a book, and it may have been the only copy available in the world. The library and its collection therefore became critical to the reputation of a university, and\u00a0professors had to borrow the only text from the library and literally read from it to the students, who dutifully wrote down their own version of the lecture.<\/p>\n Lectures themselves belong to an even longer oral tradition of learning, where knowledge is passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the next. In such contexts, accuracy and authority (or power in controlling access to knowledge) are critical for 'accepted' knowledge to be successfully transmitted. Thus accurate memory, repetition and a reference to authoritative sources become exceedingly important in terms of validating the information transmitted. The great sagas of the ancient Greeks and, much later, of the Vikings, are examples of the power of oral transmission of knowledge, continued\u00a0even today\u00a0through\u00a0the myths and legends of\u00a0many indigenous communities.<\/p>\n \n\n[caption id=\"attachment_102\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"753\"] This illustration from a thirteenth-century manuscript shows Henry of Germany delivering a lecture to university students in Bologna, Italy, in 1233. What is striking is how similar the whole context is to lectures today, with students taking notes, some talking at the back, and one clearly asleep. Certainly, if Rip Van Winkle awoke in a modern lecture theatre after 800 years of sleeping, he would know exactly where he was and what was happening.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, the lecture format has been questioned for many years.\u00a0Samuel Johnson\u00a0(1709-1784)<\/em>\u00a0over 200 years ago said\u00a0of lectures:<\/p>\n 'People have nowadays...got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken...Lectures were once useful, but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary<\/em>.'<\/p>\n Boswell, 1791<\/p>\n What is remarkable is that even after the invention of the printing press, radio, television, and the Internet, the transmissive lecture, characterised by the authoritative instructor\u00a0talking to a group of students, still remains the dominant methodology for teaching in many institutions, even in a digital age, where information is available at a click of a mouse. It could be argued that anything that has lasted\u00a0this long must have something going for it. On the other hand, we need to question whether the transmissive lecture is still the most appropriate means of teaching, given all the changes that have taken place in recent years, and in particular given the kinds of knowledge and skills needed in a digital age.<\/p>\n\n Whatever you may think of Samuel Johnson's opinion, there has indeed been a great deal of research into the effectiveness of lectures, going back to the 1960s, and continued through until today. The most authoritative analysis of the research on the effectiveness of lectures remains Bligh's (2000<\/a>). He summarized a wide range of meta-analyses and studies of the effectiveness\u00a0of lectures compared with other teaching methods and found consistent results:<\/p>\n\n 'We see evidence... once again to suppose that lectures should not be longer than twenty to thirty minutes - at least without techniques to vary stimulation.<\/em>'<\/p>\nThese research studies have shown that in\u00a0order to understand, analyze, apply, and commit information to long-term memory, the learner must actively engage with the material. In order for a lecture to be effective, it must include activities that compel the student to mentally manipulate the information. Many lecturers of course do this, by stopping and asking for comments or questions throughout the lecture - but many do not.\n\nAgain, although these findings\u00a0have been available for a long time, and You Tube videos now last approximately eight minutes and TED talks\u00a020 minutes at a maximum, teaching in many educational institutions is still organized around a standard 50 minute lecture session or longer,\u00a0with, if students are lucky, a few minutes at the end for questions or discussion. There are two important conclusions from the research:\n This does not mean that lectures will disappear altogether, but they will be special events, and probably multi-media, synchronously and asynchronously delivered. Special events might include:<\/p>\n\n 1. Do you agree that lectures are dead - or soon will be?<\/p>\n 2. Look at the skills needed in a digital age described in Chapter 1. Which of these skills could lectures help develop? Would they need to be redesigned or modified to do this and if so, how?<\/p>\n For feedback on the second question click on the podcast below:<\/p>\n[audio mp3=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/tonybates\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1475\/2021\/08\/How-good-are-lectures-for-skills.mp3\"][\/audio]\n\n<\/div>","rendered":" <\/p>\n [Lectures] are more or less continuous expositions by a speaker who wants the audience to learn something<\/em>.’<\/p>\n Bligh, 2000<\/a><\/p>\n This specific definition is important as it excludes contexts where a lecture is deliberately designed to be interrupted by questions or discussion between instructors and students.\u00a0This form of more interactive lecturing will be discussed\u00a0in the next section (Chapter 3, Section 4<\/a>).<\/p>\n Transmissive lectures can be traced\u00a0back as far as ancient Greek and Roman times, and certainly from at least the start of the European university, in the 13th century. The term ‘lecture’ comes from the Latin, meaning a reading. In the 13th century, most books were extremely rare. They were painstakingly handcrafted and illustrated by monks, often from fragments or collections of earlier and exceedingly rare and valuable scrolls from ancient Greek or Roman times, or were translated from Arabic sources, since\u00a0much documentation was destroyed in Europe\u00a0during the Dark Ages following the fall of the Roman empire. As a result,\u00a0a university would often have only one copy of a book, and it may have been the only copy available in the world. The library and its collection therefore became critical to the reputation of a university, and\u00a0professors had to borrow the only text from the library and literally read from it to the students, who dutifully wrote down their own version of the lecture.<\/p>\n Lectures themselves belong to an even longer oral tradition of learning, where knowledge is passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the next. In such contexts, accuracy and authority (or power in controlling access to knowledge) are critical for ‘accepted’ knowledge to be successfully transmitted. Thus accurate memory, repetition and a reference to authoritative sources become exceedingly important in terms of validating the information transmitted. The great sagas of the ancient Greeks and, much later, of the Vikings, are examples of the power of oral transmission of knowledge, continued\u00a0even today\u00a0through\u00a0the myths and legends of\u00a0many indigenous communities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This illustration from a thirteenth-century manuscript shows Henry of Germany delivering a lecture to university students in Bologna, Italy, in 1233. What is striking is how similar the whole context is to lectures today, with students taking notes, some talking at the back, and one clearly asleep. Certainly, if Rip Van Winkle awoke in a modern lecture theatre after 800 years of sleeping, he would know exactly where he was and what was happening.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, the lecture format has been questioned for many years.\u00a0Samuel Johnson\u00a0(1709-1784)<\/em>\u00a0over 200 years ago said\u00a0of lectures:<\/p>\n ‘People have nowadays…got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken…Lectures were once useful, but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary<\/em>.’<\/p>\n Boswell, 1791<\/p>\n What is remarkable is that even after the invention of the printing press, radio, television, and the Internet, the transmissive lecture, characterised by the authoritative instructor\u00a0talking to a group of students, still remains the dominant methodology for teaching in many institutions, even in a digital age, where information is available at a click of a mouse. It could be argued that anything that has lasted\u00a0this long must have something going for it. On the other hand, we need to question whether the transmissive lecture is still the most appropriate means of teaching, given all the changes that have taken place in recent years, and in particular given the kinds of knowledge and skills needed in a digital age.<\/p>\n Whatever you may think of Samuel Johnson’s opinion, there has indeed been a great deal of research into the effectiveness of lectures, going back to the 1960s, and continued through until today. The most authoritative analysis of the research on the effectiveness of lectures remains Bligh’s (2000<\/a>). He summarized a wide range of meta-analyses and studies of the effectiveness\u00a0of lectures compared with other teaching methods and found consistent results:<\/p>\n Bligh also examined research on student attention, on memorizing, and on motivation, and concluded (p.56):<\/p>\n ‘We see evidence… once again to suppose that lectures should not be longer than twenty to thirty minutes – at least without techniques to vary stimulation.<\/em>‘<\/p>\n These research studies have shown that in\u00a0order to understand, analyze, apply, and commit information to long-term memory, the learner must actively engage with the material. In order for a lecture to be effective, it must include activities that compel the student to mentally manipulate the information. Many lecturers of course do this, by stopping and asking for comments or questions throughout the lecture – but many do not.<\/p>\n Again, although these findings\u00a0have been available for a long time, and You Tube videos now last approximately eight minutes and TED talks\u00a020 minutes at a maximum, teaching in many educational institutions is still organized around a standard 50 minute lecture session or longer,\u00a0with, if students are lucky, a few minutes at the end for questions or discussion. There are two important conclusions from the research:<\/p>\n Over the years, institutions have made massive investments in adding technologies to support\u00a0lecturing. Powerpoint presentations, multiple projectors and screens, clickers for recording student responses, even ‘back-chat’ channels on Twitter, enabling students to comment on a lecture – or more often, the lecturer – in real time (surely the worst\u00a0form of torture for a speaker), have all been tried. Students have been asked to bring tablets or laptops to class, and universities in particular have invested millions of dollars in state of the art lecture theatres.<\/span>\u00a0Nevertheless, all this is just lipstick on a pig. The essence of a lecture remains\u00a0the transmission of information, all of which\u00a0is now readily and, in most cases, freely available in\u00a0other media and in more learner-friendly formats.<\/p>\n I worked in a college where in one program all students had to bring laptops to class. At least in these classes, there were some activities related to the lecture that required the students to use the laptops during class time. However, in most classes this took less than 25 per cent of the lesson time. Most of the other time, students were talked at, and as a result used their laptops for other, mainly non-academic activities, especially playing online poker.<\/p>\n Faculty often complain about students use of technology such as mobile phones or tablets, for ‘non-relevant’ multitasking in class, but this misses the point. If most students have mobile phones or laptops, why are they still having to come to a lecture hall in person? Why can\u2019t they get a podcast or a video of the lecture? Second, if they are coming, why are the lecturers not requiring them to use their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops for study purposes, such as finding sources? Why not break the\u00a0students\u00a0into small groups and get them to do some online research then come back with group answers to share with the rest of the class? If lectures are to be offered, the aim should be to make the lecture engaging in its own right, so the students are not distracted by their non-academic online activity.<\/p>\n Lectures though still have their uses. One example is\u00a0an inaugural lecture I attended for a newly appointed research professor. In this lecture, the professor summarised\u00a0all the research he and his team had done, resulting in treatments for several cancers and other diseases. This was a public lecture, so he had to satisfy not only other leading researchers in the area, but also a lay public with often no science background. He did this by using excellent visuals and analogies. The lecture was followed by a small wine and cheese reception for the audience. The lecture worked for several reasons:<\/p>\n McKeachie and Svinicki (2006<\/a>, p. 58) believe that lecturing is best used for:<\/p>\n The last point is important. Faculty often argue that the real value of a lecture is to provide a model for students of how the\u00a0faculty member, as an expert, approaches a topic or problem. Thus the important point of the lecture is not the transmission of content (facts, principles, ideas), which the students\u00a0could get from just reading, but an expert way of thinking about the topic. The trouble with this argument for lectures is three-fold:<\/p>\n Perhaps more importantly, looking at McKeachie and Svinicki’s suggestions, would it not be better for the students, rather than the lecturer, to be doing these activities in a digital age?<\/p>\n So, yes, there are a few occasions when lectures work very well. But in a digital age they should not be the default model for regular teaching. There are much better ways to teach that will result in better learning over the length of a course or program.<\/p>\n Given all of the above, some explanation needs to be offered for the persistence of the lecture into the 21st century. Here are some\u00a0suggestions:<\/p>\n That depends on how far into the future one wants to look. When teachers and instructors had to go online during the pandemic, most merely moved their lectures online. Given the inertia in the system, transmissive lectures are likely still to predominate for another ten years, but after that, in most institutions, courses based on three\u00a0one-hour lectures a week over 13 weeks are likely to\u00a0have disappeared. There are several reasons why this may happen:<\/p>\n This does not mean that lectures will disappear altogether, but they will be special events, and probably multi-media, synchronously and asynchronously delivered. Special events might include:<\/p>\n Lectures will provide a chance for instructors to make themselves known, to impart their interests and enthusiasm, and to motivate learners, but this will be just one, relatively small, but important component of a much broader learning experience for students.<\/p>\n For a different\u00a0and\u00a0informed\u00a0perspective on the role and future of lectures, see Christine Gross-Loh, 2016.<\/a><\/p>\n Bligh, D. (2000)\u00a0What’s the Use of Lectures?\u00a0<\/em><\/a>San Francisco: Jossey-Bass<\/p>\n Boswell, J. (1791), The Life of Samuel Johnson<\/i><\/a>, New York: Penguin Classics (edited by\u00a0Hibbert, C., 1986)<\/p>\n Gross-Loh, C. (2016) Should colleges really eliminate the college lecture?<\/a> The Atlantic<\/em>, 14 July<\/p>\n3.3.2 The origins of the lecture<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/openstudio.pub\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2025\/05\/Medieval-lecture-2.jpg\")
Figure 3.3.2 A medieval lecture
Artist: Laurentius de Voltolina;
Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Alemannia; Kupferstichkabinett SMPK, Berlin\/Staatliche Museen Preussiischer Kulturbesitz, Min. 1233[\/caption]\n3.3.3 What does research tell us about the effectiveness of lectures?<\/h2>\n
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3.3.4 Does new technology make lectures more relevant?<\/h2>\nOver the years, institutions have made massive investments in adding technologies to support\u00a0lecturing. Powerpoint presentations, multiple projectors and screens, clickers for recording student responses, even 'back-chat' channels on Twitter, enabling students to comment on a lecture - or more often, the lecturer - in real time (surely the worst\u00a0form of torture for a speaker), have all been tried. Students have been asked to bring tablets or laptops to class, and universities in particular have invested millions of dollars in state of the art lecture theatres.<\/span>\u00a0Nevertheless, all this is just lipstick on a pig. The essence of a lecture remains\u00a0the transmission of information, all of which\u00a0is now readily and, in most cases, freely available in\u00a0other media and in more learner-friendly formats.\n\nI worked in a college where in one program all students had to bring laptops to class. At least in these classes, there were some activities related to the lecture that required the students to use the laptops during class time. However, in most classes this took less than 25 per cent of the lesson time. Most of the other time, students were talked at, and as a result used their laptops for other, mainly non-academic activities, especially playing online poker.\n\nFaculty often complain about students use of technology such as mobile phones or tablets, for 'non-relevant' multitasking in class, but this misses the point. If most students have mobile phones or laptops, why are they still having to come to a lecture hall in person? Why can\u2019t they get a podcast or a video of the lecture? Second, if they are coming, why are the lecturers not requiring them to use their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops for study purposes, such as finding sources? Why not break the\u00a0students\u00a0into small groups and get them to do some online research then come back with group answers to share with the rest of the class? If lectures are to be offered, the aim should be to make the lecture engaging in its own right, so the students are not distracted by their non-academic online activity.\n
3.3.5 Is there then no role for lectures in a digital age?<\/h2>\nLectures though still have their uses. One example is\u00a0an inaugural lecture I attended for a newly appointed research professor. In this lecture, the professor summarised\u00a0all the research he and his team had done, resulting in treatments for several cancers and other diseases. This was a public lecture, so he had to satisfy not only other leading researchers in the area, but also a lay public with often no science background. He did this by using excellent visuals and analogies. The lecture was followed by a small wine and cheese reception for the audience. The lecture worked for several reasons:\n
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\n \t
\n \t
3.3.6 Why are lectures still the main form of educational delivery?<\/h2>\nGiven all of the above, some explanation needs to be offered for the persistence of the lecture into the 21st century. Here are some\u00a0suggestions:\n
\n \t
3.3.7 Is there a future for lectures in a digital age?<\/h2>\nThat depends on how far into the future one wants to look. When teachers and instructors had to go online during the pandemic, most merely moved their lectures online. Given the inertia in the system, transmissive lectures are likely still to predominate for another ten years, but after that, in most institutions, courses based on three\u00a0one-hour lectures a week over 13 weeks are likely to\u00a0have disappeared. There are several reasons why this may happen:\n
\n \t
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References<\/h2>\nBligh, D. (2000)\u00a0What's the Use of Lectures?\u00a0<\/em><\/a>San Francisco: Jossey-Bass\n\nBoswell, J. (1791), The Life of Samuel Johnson<\/i><\/a>, New York: Penguin Classics (edited by\u00a0Hibbert, C., 1986)\n\nGross-Loh, C. (2016) Should colleges really eliminate the college lecture?<\/a> The Atlantic<\/em>, 14 July\n\nMcKeachie, W. and Svinicki, M. (2006) McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research and Theory for College and University Teachers<\/em><\/a> Boston\/New York: Houghton Mifflin\n
Activity 3.3 The future of lectures<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/openstudio.pub\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2014\/09\/Lecture-theatre-2.jpg\")
3.3.1 Definition<\/h2>\n
3.3.2 The origins of the lecture<\/h2>\n
Artist: Laurentius de Voltolina;
Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Alemannia; Kupferstichkabinett SMPK, Berlin\/Staatliche Museen Preussiischer Kulturbesitz, Min. 1233<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n3.3.3 What does research tell us about the effectiveness of lectures?<\/h2>\n
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3.3.4 Does new technology make lectures more relevant?<\/h2>\n
3.3.5 Is there then no role for lectures in a digital age?<\/h2>\n
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3.3.6 Why are lectures still the main form of educational delivery?<\/h2>\n
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3.3.7 Is there a future for lectures in a digital age?<\/h2>\n
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References<\/h2>\n