The Disappearing Lecture

Thanks to Covid-19, we will not be seeing large lecture university classes meeting in person. Social and physical distancing are the watchwords. Students could still watch lectures online, but why should they watch no-name me, when they can instead learn watch lectures from famous scholars at famous institutions? The university lecture of the twentieth century is going extinct – one of the predictions by Wertheimer & Woody in an intriguingly-titled article that muses about the professoriate of this century (see abstract below).

The authors note the increase in the scholarship of teaching and learning coming out of their broader area of psychology. The future they predict, “individual mentorship, small seminars, and advising” are things emphasized at undergraduate-focused liberal arts colleges, so I’m happy to see that. But it will be an expensive shift if you’re not already doing this, regardless of whether you’re employing new technologies. I’m sure someone out there is looking for the end-all education app, the robot-in-the-sky tutor that you can plug into and download into your brain the ephemeral thing we call knowledge. I think it’s presumptuous, but perhaps the nature of teaching makes that so. The authors take a stab at this idea:

“Teaching is a presumptuous activity. It presumes that the teacher knows something that the students do not know, that it’s worth knowing, and that the teacher knows how to teach it. Is paying substantial tuition and other costs and sitting for a long time in a classroom with someone talking at you and a group of your colleagues a worthwhile endeavor?” If Zoom collected statistics on student attention, we might have a numerical answer to this question. The authors probe the ‘task’ of teaching:

“What is its aim? It is to impart knowledge, skill, and wisdom to those who presumably do not yet have it by someone who presumably does have it. The effective teacher obviously has to have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the subject to be taught. But the effective teacher also should have some idea of the student’s initial ‘cognitive map’ of the subject to be taught… [and] the teacher must have a strategy for generating the transition of the student’s naïve cognitive map into one that coincides more closely with the teacher’s map.” Essentially, one is trying to move students along a continuum from novice to expert, or at least that’s what I talk about in my blog posts.

The article calls for “further development of and emphasis on a technology of teaching that is thoroughly grounded in rigorous empirical evidence and based on the translation of basic research findings into practical applications.” This sounds nice. And scientific. But finding reliable and valid measurements is a huge bugbear. Because of my interest in this area, I’ve read hundreds of such articles – they do shed light on some small aspects here and there, but there are too many confounding variables. Teaching humans is a messy business. We don’t truly understand how it works. Even the nature of improving reasoning ability is not straightforward.

Teaching at scale will always be a challenge because of the diversity of students and their experiences. We are not robots. Some technocrats might hope we are, or try to treat us as such. Or make us identify on a website that we are not bots indeed. I occasionally fantasize about one-on-one teaching tutorials at one’s leisure with a motivated student or two. The only time I experienced this was working on my undergraduate thesis at a liberal arts college. My adviser was technically on sabbatical, but for some reason he didn’t say no when I asked if he would supervise my thesis, for which I’m very thankful! Unfortunately I’m not doing as well with my own students; everyone just seems so busy, including me. In the meantime, I will just keep calm, carry on, and try to improve as a teacher bit by bit.