Final lectures and thoughts
I graduated from university recently and having spent some seven odd years at that venerable institution, I have collected some baggage which I need to express but which I also feel would help educators to improve themselves.
I think the word is catharsis.
Due to an administrative mixup and some human errors (both not completely my fault), I still have to follow one course: in4012tu Speech and Language Processing. This isn’t too much of a pain because languages are completely my thing and it gives me an excuses to pretend that I am a student for two more months.
One risk is that I stand the chance of being the gunner in this class. It is really easy to ignore the mantra: Learn, not teach.
Recording
One idea that I have concerns recording lectures. Our lectures have to be given in English if somebody in the hall requests it. This is very much to the chagrin of most our lecturers. Teachers at DUT have to lecture Masters courses in English but most of them hardly relish this opportunity to improve their language skills.
One of the overlooked advantages of lecturing in English is that it greatly increases your reach, not only to those one or two international students in the lecture hall, but to the entire world.
Seeing as all major conferences are already being recorded to be publicized after the fact, wouldn’t it be completely trivial for an university to do the same with lectures? And even if it wasn’t provided by university, I think anybody with a Macbook could easily tape themselves with the builtin iSight. Last weekend I did an impromptu video shoot and had it uploaded to YouTube within minutes.
The quality of the material, though not optimal, would be wholly acceptable for anybody interested in learning the stuff. With some extra effort the lecturer could also sync his slides to the video stream in a custom application (Slideshare + YouTube mashup anybody?) to provide a better viewing experience.
I can think of a great number of advantages but here’s one to start you off:
Giving a lecture is an important and time consuming activity and as such also should be worth recording for future reference. The value of creating a personal video archive of yourself telling interesting stuff should be directly evident to everybody. Publishing that video on a personal blog would further increase your value as a teacher/scholar. You could show the world that you are a valuable and interesting person and build a global following.
Just think what this would do for your next job interview or your chances of getting tenure.
Why would you not do this? One real reason could be the university’s intellectual property stance. Is a lecturer allowed to record his own lecture and do cool stuff with it? I have no clue but it seems worth a try.
Hyperspeed
Second point is the speed at which most lectures are given. This is not completely to my taste. I hope this isn’t representative of the speed at which university students absorb information because if so, then the innovation position of the Netherlands is in deep shit indeed.
Hyperspeed is a feature. After my graduation talk some people told me that not only had I started off too fast but that I also was accelerating during the course of my presentation. This was in part because I was nervous but mostly just because I had a lot to say and a limited amount of time in which to say it.
There are excellent speakers who have also learned to pace themselves very well and use rhythm and silence for maximum effect and information conveyance (see some at TED). This can work for expert communicators but in most cases going too slow is definitely a bug and runs the risk of putting me and the rest of your audience to sleep.
There are also speakers who go really fast and don’t effect less because of it. One of the best lectures I attended at university was given by Charl Botha and in my memory it stands out like a visual TGV ride.
I definitely think I can improve on my presenting and pacing but speed per se will probably not be one of the first things to be improved. Next time you see me present, just “Prepare for ludicrous speed”.
A suggested improvement to speedup lectures: have everybody watch all the slides in advance and make mental notes about stuff that isn’t clear. Have the lecturer go through the slides at high speed only stopping for questions. Use the rest of the time to do non-sleep inducing stuff.
Eelke http://blog.eelkedekker.nl
April 18th, 2007First: I don’t know if it is possible at all to provide slides that are that good, that they tell a clear story, at least I never saw it @ my faculty. For all I care it would be wiser to read the course-book, and organize a question-hour.
Second: A drawback of racing your presentation is not that people can’t follow your message because they are too slow, but because they can’t understand the words, that are swallowed or melted together. Pronunciation shouldn’t suffer from speed.
Third: I think the challenge is in keeping a complex story simple so people remember the headlines.
Ciao Bella!
alper http://alper.nl
April 18th, 2007Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Any lecturer should be able to present his material without slides and should dare to get naked.
Point taken about the pronunciation.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
April 19th, 2007I’ve been thinking about your post for a while, but all I can conclude about presenting/educating is this:
There are no rules. No rules to help you avoid pitfalls, and no rules to help make your slides better. There are perfectly valid reasons for telling people to slow down. And there are perfectly valid reasons for telling people to speed up. There are perfectly valid reasons to eliminate or reduce slides to only one every 5 minutes. There are perfectly valid reasons to create a presentation with a slide every 5 seconds.
I could go on for a while.
The short of it is: education/presenting requires massive amounts of experience, a willingness to go for it, and large doses of creativity and hard work in order to become extraordinary.
The ‘rules’ can help you, but only if you really grok where a given rule is coming from, and take that to heart.
For example, slow speaking is combination of clear pronunciation and speech timing (shutting up for a few moments drives home the point you made right before the silence), but it also makes people reduce the cognitive payload which in most situations is a good thing. For someone who has already boiled his point down to the bare essence, speeding up is better.
But even if you take that to heart, you still need to learn when to pause for effect, how to pronounce clearly whether you’re speaking quickly or slowly, when to speak fast, when to speak slow, and how to first boil your point down to the bare essence, and then come up with very creative ways of driving this point home in such a way that the audience walks away wanting it, knowing it, never forgetting it.
In other words, the ‘rules’ can be a starting point. Making a good presentation where you force yourself to use a slide/minute ratio of over 6.0 one day, and below 0.2 the next. Because you keep moving out of familiar territory putting such presentations together is a lot of work and you need to test drive in front of a mirror twice, and a test audience at least once, before you go ‘live’.
For what it’s worth, professors will never ever produce lectures that actually teach the viewers until they care about presenting. If a professor doesn’t watch Dick Hardt, Steve Jobs, Lawrence Lessig, half the TED speeches, recording himself and reviewing the result, asking his students after exams (so there is some perspective and no feeling that an answer might impact grades) about his presenting style, and other acts of interest in the art of presenting… he’ll suck at it. It’s that simple. Yes, this takes boatloads of time, and it’s one of the reasons I feel the majority of topics need to be handled by a professional educator - record a sufficiently knowledgable professor with legendary didactic skills once, and that course is now covered for all universities worldwide that can handle English.
Of course, trying to achieve even a shadow of the above pipedreams in your average university is a fool’s errand; universities are far too resistant to change, and professors don’t give a crap; they don’t need to improve because they have tenure, and the only thing they care about is their research. Administrators don’t want the upheaval and don’t dare stick their neck out for something new.
Charl P. Botha http://cpbotha.net/
April 20th, 2007Wow Alper, thank you very much for your gracious and generous compliment!
(I stumbled on fourstarters.com via my Wordpress referrer dashboard; this site is now in my aggregator.
@Reinier:
I agree that many professors are more interested in their research than in teaching; research is often the primary reason for them to work at a university, but universities (at least in the Netherlands) usually don’t have positions for tenured researchers, so there you are.
The flip side of this is that if you do have a motivated researcher who’s really enthusiastic about their field, this tends to shine through in their teaching and students get exposed to cutting edge science.
The TU Delft is actively working on improving the average quality of its lecturers: we young ones are all “strongly encouraged” (read: compelled) to follow an intensive multi-moduled course on topics such as active and collaborative learning, lecturing in English, applying modern techniques for project-based or problem-based learning, and so forth. Currently, all lecturers also have to complete a standard English proficiency test. Lecturers that do not attain a sufficiently high rating (the threshold is quite high), have to follow yet more courses. Hopefully in an academic generation or two
the situation will have improved dramatically.
alper http://alper.nl
April 20th, 2007@Charl: You’re welcome (compliments are free after all). I can think of one negative point and that is that there are too few such lectures.
I hear you about the improvements but our experiences in effecting change in university have not been hopeful. Studies as well as common experience have shown that PowerPoint is harmful and that people’s attention spans do not extend to 45 minutes. Continuing to subject students to passive lectures is -I think- inexcusably ignorant (but something for another post).
That’s why my original post mentioned that one person with a Macbook and an internet connection can do everything by himself. You don’t have to wait for anybody because if you do you will be waiting still.
To get back to my proposed new ecosystem:
I mentioned that a lecturer could reach a far greater audience by using the internet and create value for himself even with just the bare recordings of his lectures.
With a long tail for content somebody is bound to find them of value, or given an appropriate license anybody with the skills could edit them into a more attractive package.
Motivated students can already educate themselves using podcasts and conference recordings from TED, Pop!Tech, SxSW and many many others. You don’t have to listen to your teacher anymore or use his books, you can find better material online.
So in this new ecosystem how do we distribute financial compensation and educational credit, or will we just not bother anymore in 5-10 years?
Charl P. Botha http://cpbotha.net/
April 20th, 2007@Alper:
MMI has dipped its little toe and produced some web lectures: http://yukon.twi.tudelft.nl/weblectures/mmi.html (I guess you know about these.)
I know of some other groups at the TU Delft that have experimented with this. I like the idea, don’t be surprised if you see something appear online at some stage (as soon as I’ve eliminated my current todo list, ha ha).
However, the sad fact is that the group of students willing to make the time to educate themselves with this type of media is currently very small: mostly a minority of more motivated students. The rest somehow do require the crutch of having to pitch up at a lecture to listen to a mediocre lecturer drawling on.
In the end, I think that two things need to happen: lecturers need to focus on somehow better interacting with and involving their students during lectures (it has been shown by people in the know that this, if done right, dramatically increases information retention); courses could be augmented with web-lectures for revision or further study purposes.