Nobody applauds at the end of a lecture

Most readers will have seen Bo Burnham’s Inside Netflix Special, so I will not take your time describing what it was about. What I want to talk about in this short post, is something that really struck a note with me while I was watching. Something that the comedian keeps coming back to in his performances, the need for an audience and what a life on stage does to your psyche.

Is teaching a performance? Should higher education be classed as a form of entertainment? University lecturers step on a platform, sit behind a podium and address large groups as a matter of course. Students have paid to be there, this is not a free show. How you behave during that performance becomes a key part of the student experience, and it puts enormous pressure on everyone delivering. Are you interesting enough? Are you informative enough? Is your material presented well, does it communicate? Is it boring? Is it exciting? Do you seem excited while you are delivering it? Are you charismatic? Are you funny? Do you dress well? Do you shuffle and fidget? How is your hair? How are your shoes? Is that mustard on your shirt?

Before you think, "come on, lecturing isn’t like this, it isn’t a show, we aren’t putting on a panto", consider the feedback forms your students are asked to return. If you get any free style comments on those forms what are they about? They are usually on how you deliver, not on what you deliver. Someone ignorant on the subject, but fun and approachable will score higher on the ‘made the course interesting’ type questions, than a subject expert who has difficulty ‘performing’. How many times have your managers stressed the need for students to be engaged? For engaged, read entertained.

And so far as the live experience goes, getting real-time feedback from your audience, does not make things much better. How many of you are teaching to an Apple store? Rows of the backs of mac screens in an amphitheatre? Or trying to talk to students bent over their phones, in all likelihood looking at their tiktok reel, rather than your VLE content? In seminars, you get to engage directly, fair enough, but in lectures you deliver speeches to a sea of screens and devices, hoping that the head hiding behind takes something in. At least an audience in a stand-up show will cheer or boo the performer.

Now take all this, the pressure to ‘perform’ and students' desire to be stimulated and engaged, which usually means entertained, and place it in the online domain that we have all inhabited (alongside Burnham) since the spring of 2020. Are you performing well online? The necessity of delivering teaching online both in a synchronous and asynchronous manner has turned our annual teaching delivery into rolling Netflix specials. How do you come across on a zoom meeting? Do your students find a close up of your nostril on a webcam for an hour rewarding? How about the unmade bed in the background? The kids coming in, or the cats jumping on the keyboard, or a steaming bowl of noodles on the side?

And what was the actual delivery like online? Substitute the sea of mac books with egg avatars on a screen and you have it. The lecturer will talk, show slides, ask questions and be met, not exclusively but often enough, by absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Hi and bye in the chat, and silence, quiet, serene nothingness in between. At least in an actual class you can see them bending over their phones, or the hair gradually sinking behind the laptop screen. The egg avatar remains oval.

One key difference between Mr Burnham’s YouTube efforts, and Netflix output and you as a lecturer is that they both know intimately whether people watch and how they react to their content. Your average lecturer isn’t knowledgeable, or interested, or has the time to delve into VLE analytics to see what the students are doing when not in a live session. The impression many have looking back at these last two academic sessions is that lecturers worked themselves raw producing ‘content’, podcasts, videos, texts, notes, graphics, slides and uploaded them into the void, where it sits unobserved, unused, unwatched. Universities have focused on giving students value for money, commonly interpreted as throwing content at them. They have not focused on whether students want, use or appreciate that content.

There is no applaud function on the VLE. Bo Burnham has said, if you can live your life without an audience, do that. Can academics live their life without an audience? Can teachers teach without students? Can researchers write with no readers? Does the tree you uploaded on the VLE’s digital forest make a sound if no one logs on to see it fall? May I refer you to some well-being material we buried on SharePoint?

Nobody applauds at the end of an online lecture either.

Mr Burnham isn’t the only one with a YouTube channel. Head over to mine by clicking here and applaud this article by subscribing.