No longer tuned in to master's voice

Online digital environments are inviting all of us to reject the role of spectatorship and to participate actively in our own learning write Erica McWilliam and Norman Jackson GO TO almost any Australian university campus and you will find at least one big lecture theatre. Whether built last year or a century ago, lecture theatres have a predictable design: hundreds of tiered seats arranged so that hundreds of students can be focused fairly and squarely on a singular podium where a singular figure ? a lecturer ? gives a lecture. We continue to insist on the term lecturer as the appropriate professional title for an academic below the rank of professor or associate professor. Lectures, like sermons, were once part and parcel of a society in which elites were in the know and the great unwashed were presumed ignorant. Students, as seekers after knowledge, sat at the feet, literally and metaphorically, of the great man. Feet-sitting is not the predilection of 21st-century students. Whether we call them gen C, gen Y or gen Z, the net generation, millennials, digital natives, the online generation or the gamer generation, today?s young people have multiple ways of informing themselves, and being lectured to is unlikely to be high on their list of preferences. According to a recent US research study, young gamers do not tolerate front-end instruction. They jump over instruction manuals, learning to use a meta-map or to operate without one, rather than learning from instruction from outside the subculture. Hands-on trial and error is the dominant learning mode. Not all university students are gamers and many are not young. However, there is a message here that is bringing content delivery through lecturing into collision with the learning preferences of today\u27s students. Online digital environments are inviting all of us to reject the role of spectatorship and to participate actively in our own learning. In the terms used by Axel Bruns, a senior lecturer in the Queensland University of Technology?s creative industries faculty, we are all being enabled to become ?prod-users? ? both producers and users of knowledge ? not just passive consumers of expert knowledge that comes from above. The pedagogical geometry is horizontal, not vertical. So what are we to do with our big, expensive lecture theatres? After all, a 400 to one student-teacher ratio is a cheap pedagogical option, even if it is becoming a less effective one for 21st century learning. Moreover, the lecture?tutorial combination is a form of pedagogical work with which administrators, academics and students are all comfortably familiar. Familiarity, as we know, breeds contempt, and there is no doubt that students express this contempt when they vote with their feet to avoid lectures. One reason they give for this is the nature of the material presented. Frequently, it comes straight out of textbooks or lecture notes, giving students little incentive to attend. That the traditional presentation is nearly always delivered as a monologue in front of a passive audience compounds the problem. Only exceptional lecturers are capable of holding students? attention for an entire lecture period. It is even more difficult to provide an adequate opportunity for students to think critically about the arguments and propositions being developed. Consequently, lectures simply reinforce students? feelings that the most important step in mastering the material is memorising a zoo of apparently unrelated examples. Lecturing leaves it to them to join the dots. Little wonder that, after a week or two, our lecture theatre cohort has so often dwindled to a few hardy, compliant souls, who may attend more out of anxiety about missing something than any desire to engage in meaningful learning. We do not have to lock up our lecture theatres. But we do have to stop using them to give lectures. The best alternatives do not reside in simply podcasting lectures or adding more dot-points to the PowerPoint slides that students can access on the subject website. They reside in new forms of pedagogical engagement that invite prod-user participation rather than passive consumption. Here are two approaches being trialled in the US and Britain. Peer instruction is a technique developed by Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. Mazur realised that, despite getting good feedback from his students, their test results were poorer than they should be. To address this issue, he devised peer instruction. Instead of just listening, students respond continually to conceptual questions, called ConcepTests, designed to expose common difficulties in understanding the material. The students are given one to two minutes to think about the question and formulate their own answers; they then spend two to three minutes discussing their answers in groups of three to four, attempting to reach consensus on the correct answer. The teacher then can check understandings through a show of hands. The process can be significantly enhanced through the use of an audience response system (voting system or clickers) that provides excellent feedback to teacher and students on levels of understanding. This is not a difficult technique to implement. Two levels of introductory physics have been taught at Harvard using this strategy and students made significant gains in conceptual understanding (as measured by standardised tests) as well as gaining problem-solving skills comparable with those acquired in traditionally taught classes. Indeed, Mazur?s university, after seeing video footage of this technique, decided to introduce his voting systems and peer discussion methods. Following successful piloting, many lecturers are adopting the approach. Dozens of instructors at other institutions have implemented peer instruction with their own students and found similar results. Inquiry-based learning is another approach to make lecture sessions more engaging. George Allan of the University of Portsmouth in Britain has developed a simple but effective way of moving a lecture program into a more engaging social process. Following a more traditional (but shortened) input from the lecturer, the students do not simply depart. The last ten to fifteen minutes are spent identifying a topic to be investigated before the next lecture session, thus motivating students to engage in peer-to-peer inquiry. The first fifteen minutes of the next session are spent engaging students in small group discussion (teams of three in a large lecture theatre) and the main part of the lecture is spent drawing from the student inquiries the main points they have found, correcting misunderstandings and, if possible, adding any important omissions. This makes for a much more participative culture than the traditional offerings of solitary, unconnected instruction. The approach does not require any rewriting of lecture notes. But the distribution of handouts differs. Students have to make inquiries and find the subject matter instead of being told the facts in a lecture or handout. Although some lecturers express anxiety about whether and how they will cover the syllabus, the students go about the business of getting through it and more. They can move much faster without waiting for the content delivery to come from the podium. This approach not only provides opportunities for students to participate in their own constructive thinking but it leads to better learning, which in turn leads to improved assessment results in exams and in coursework assignments. Britain?s University of Surrey is in the early stages of introducing this technique. More than 25 lecturers in four faculties participated in a workshop to introduce the design idea and each is adapting a module or several sessions in the module to teach this way in the northern autumn. The results will be shared in a conference at the end of the year. Students need to be engaged and monologic lectures are unlikely to do this. However, neither should we expect digital tools to provide pedagogical solutions in and of themselves. Moving everything online will not build prod-user capacity if the pedagogy remains subject-centred, expert-driven, and transmissive. We can\u27t redesign our learning spaces overnight but we can make them more participatory and engaging with some simple technology adaptations and some practical changes to our large group teaching practices. ? Erica McWilliam is professor of education at Queensland University of Technology and Program Leader of Creative Workforce at CCI. Norman Jackson is professor of higher education at the University of Surrey. This article was first published in the Australian Higher Education Supplemen