I No longer Believe in Class Lectures

I No longer Believe in Class Lectures

?[Every time I teach classes with more than 20 students I feel more like a cowboy than an university professor.?]

Although I love teaching, I no longer believe in class lectures.?I think it has become a very inefficient way of imparting education and wisdom.?

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The use of smart phones, for example, has made the instructor to look unnecessary and irrelevant.?I daily walk by very large classes at my university and see instructors presenting very interesting materials, but the majority of the students are looking at their computers or smart phones. ??They maybe also consulting Google and ChatGPT if not something totally unrelated to the class topic.

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The excessive use of these tech tools can lead to distraction and can reduce the amount of time students spend engaging in creative activities such as reading, writing, or designing, etc.???

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This problem is significantly reduced for post-graduate courses due to the smaller group of students and the discussing approach normally used.

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But it is not just smartphones which have made large class lectures utterly useless.?The reality is that the educational system treats university students as if they were high school kids – still learning the fundamentals – making them memorize figures and regurgitate pre-digested materials.?? The basic principle of the education system (as a business) is to be that idlers must not be made to feel inferior industrious students. These differences between the pupils — for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences — must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. Examinations in many cases must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks.?

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But is that what the student really desires??A course syllabus which may look more like a cake-recipe or a pre-cooked meal? ??Every time I teach classes with more than 20 students (in rows of chairs) I feel more like a cowboy than an university professor.

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In Our English Syllabus we read:

“With?these?limitations, then, we hand you over our tract of reality. Do not be deceived by talk about the narrowness of the specialist. The opposite of the specialist is the student enslaved to someone else's selection. In the great rough countryside, which we throw open to you, you can choose your own path. Here's your gun, your spade, your fishing-tackle; go and get yourself a dinner.

Do not tell me that you would sooner have a nice composite menu of dishes from half the world drawn up for you. You are too old for that. It is time you learned to wrestle with?nature for yourself. And whom will you trust to draw up the menu? How do you know that in that very river which I would exclude as poisonous the fish you specially want, the undiscovered fish, is waiting? And you would never find it if you let us select.

Our selection would be an effort to bind the future within our present knowledge and taste: nothing more could come out than we had put in. It would be worse; it would be a kind of propaganda, concealed, unconscious, and omnipotent. Is it really true that you would prefer that to the run of your teeth over the whole country? Have you no incredulity, no skepticism, left?”

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If you call me an old-fashioned professor, I will take it as a compliment, but I think it is time to return to a tutoring style for teaching, where the instructor presents some raw ingredients – theoretical and practical – and have the students to ruminate and further research them and have live Socratic discussions.??

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Students need to take the ownership of their education.?The function of the instructor should be just to inspire?and?nourish the imaginative faculty of the?students and?guide them to see the big picture rather than providing digested / spoon fed material.?That will help students to develop their intellectual muscles.

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Perhaps this will not work for all undergraduate classes, but definitely need to be implemented in more disciplines before videos and distance learning takes over the place of a real instructor.

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Here is a fine example of a student explaining the tutorial system at Oxford in the late forties (The practice has been an integral part of Oxford University since the 1800’s)

“They?(instructors) read books in their own rooms … Their reading, thinking, and writing were part of a unified life, neither "job" nor "recreation," because?they?were both.?They?did?not, strictly speaking, "teach." In the morning and evenings of the term?they?were visited by their pupils, who "read the subject with them. It was?not?exactly an egalitarian society, but there was a sense of fundamental equality and unity, divided into ranks and stages. I had?not?doubt, at the age of eighteen, that for all the differences of temperament, intelligence, ability, learning and age between me and this distinguished, jolly man, we were nevertheless of the same kind, engaged in the same pursuit. And the reason I felt this was no doubt because that was how my instructor treated me. I was?not?a schoolboy to be?taught?and disciplined,?not?a "student," but a "person."

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It is easier for me to say that now that I am getting close to the end of my teaching career (retiring in 5 years), but I would like to encourage early academics to consider more integrative approaches, rather than the traditional lecture, to inspire younger generations of engineers, and scholars.

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In case you want to know more about the tutorial system at Oxford University I include a link below:

https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/tutorial-system

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Cheers,

Paulo

PS - The picture above shows a kind of tutorial meeting with researchers at the Technological University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, to discuss the drafts of their papers, 2012. We had a great time - correcting and challenging each other.