Universities Should Not Plan a Return to Lectures-as-Usual

Recently US colleagues asked about plans for the return to the university campus for students, after COVID-19 lock-downs. The consensus emerging seems to be to provide for students remote online, as well as in the class at the same time. Classrooms would be equipped with microphones, cameras, screens and computers (many already are), so remote students could see and hear the instructor, as well as those in the room.

However, I will still be taking the laptop and web camera I have been  using for teaching at home, along as a backup. That might be a useful  approach for institutions which don't have all classrooms equipped for live video.

In Australia we are fortunate to receive reasonably consistent advice from local, state and federal authorities on COVID-19 measures. Some of this has the force of law, through health and safety legislation, as well as specific COVID-19 emergency regulations. However, there are currently no specific guidelines for universities (the ones for schools are clearly not applicable), so the closest is for workplaces.

A prudent approach, I suggest, would be to have staff return to work first, then small group teaching, and lastly large groups. However, there are some difficult legal and ethical dilemmas, particularly with large group teaching.

Conventional lectures, with large numbers of students, in a cramped lecture theater, probably pose the highest infection risk. Also this is the least effective form of teaching. A conventional face to face lecture is no better for student learning than watching a video. So there is no good reason to resume lectures, ever (I stopped giving lectures ten years ago). There will still be scope for a presentation by a celebrity guest speaker, and for interactive learning with a group of people,. However, I suggest universities do not plan a return to conventional lectures, with someone speaking for an hour to hundreds (most students gave up attending these years ago, anyway). Instead universities should start decommissioning, re-purposing, or demolishing, lecture theaters, to make way for flexible learning spaces.

ANU Marie Reay Teaching Centre

The ANU Kambri complex, opened in February 2019, provides an example of an alternate approach to large university teaching spaces. The Marie Reay Teaching Centre has six floors of entirely flat floor classrooms, with movable chairs and tables. This allows occupants to be more easily spread out, than in a fixed seating lecture theater. If conditions allow, the tables can be pushed aside and chairs arranged close togehter lecture style. During construction, I asked the engineers if the prefabricated manufactured wood panels allowed the building to be modified more easily modified than in a concrete building. The reply was that this would need just a structural engineer, and a chainsaw: in other words the building could be easily modified.

The adjacent Culture and Events Building has multipurpose rooms with retractable theater seating. At the push of a button the tiered seating retracts into the wall, leaving a flat floor space for chairs and tables to be placed. The foresight of those who planned these buildings is to be commended.

Dogfooding the Interactive Lecture at ANU

Greetings from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, where I have been taking part in an interactive lecture on "Deep Learning and Interactive Lectures" by Glen O'Grady, Director of the ANU Centre for Higher Education, Learning & Teaching. This used the Echo 360 Active Learning Platform (ALP) and is an example of dogfooding: leading by example, using the tools you are advocating others use.

Echo's ALP seems to have moved some way towards the combining of lecture recording and webinar software which I outlined in a paper (Worthington, 2013) and discussed later that year with staff at Echo360's Perth office. This would allow students to interact live in the classroom, remotely in real time, or later with a recording. One feature still missing is for the student to be able to pause the live event and time shift. Students would then be able to interact as if the lecture was in real time, answering quiz questions, entering and reading text chat, but minutes or days, later.

However, the focus of Glen's talk was the pedagogy of increasing interaction in "lectures", rather than the gadgets. This seems to be a development of "Lecture 2.0" from a decade ago, to make the classroom experience more engaging. The problem with this was, and still is, the constraints of the room layouts available, the curriculum, and perhaps most of all, the lecturer's limited course design and teaching skills.

Conventional lecture theaters are designed for the student to be able to see and hear the lecturer, not for group interaction. Even where interaction is physically possible, lecturers have difficulty using a format other then them talking and students listening, as this is the only teaching technique they know.

The focus needs to be, I suggest, on students and their learning needs, not lecturer's dreams of full lecture theaters. Rather than try to modify lectures to make them more interactive, I suggest replacing them with better teaching techniques. This requires the teaching staff to be trained in how to teach (not lecture) and to use different forms of assessment. Lectures can then be a very minor supplement to more effective teaching techniques.

The ANU is building a new flexible learning centre with rooms for "flipped" classes (as discussed in "Brave New World in Future Teaching Spaces" by Bella Dimattina, Woroni, ANU, 3 October 2017). What is needed to use the new building effectively is to also flip the thinking of the teaching staff. Rather than worry about how to get students to come to "lectures", the priority should be first the learning outcomes, then the assessment for those outcomes and lastly what form of scaffolded learning activities are needed.

An example of this approach is the ANU Techlauncher program, where students undertake a project on a real-world problem in teams, or as individual interns, working for a real organization. The student's work is project based, with them attending weekly tutorials for mutual support and advice from a tutor. There are also workshops and conventional lectures. However, the lectures are the least important part of the course.

Reference

Worthington, T. (2013). Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques. In Proceedings of 2013 8th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 26 Apr - 28 Apr 2013 , Sri Lanka. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2013.6553983
Preprint available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/9556