We are having a discussion in my department over whether to provide podcasts of lectures so that when a lecturer is off sick students can access what they have missed. This is controversial not least because many university lecturers, as with school teachers, dislike the idea that a lecture is something set in stone. Instead, it is an organic happening that emerges out of the classroom and never quite sticks to plan!
But the idea of providing lectures in another format if teachers are absent emerges out of discontented student complaints (not just at our university I hasten to add!) about the quality of the teaching provision they receive. These complaints have risen significantly in the past few years, not because teaching standards have gone down, but because students are becoming more like customers, demanding a certain service for their money. And some would argue, rightly so, as they and their parents often come out of the university system in huge debt.
As well as the complaint about absent lecturers another one heard frequently is the complaint about the number of classroom hours taught. In the humanities it is normal that a student might only have 8-9 hours of classroom time per week, sometimes even less. And for the thousands of pounds paid, this seems like a small return. The problem is that the core of humanities study is independent, self-driven research undertaken in the library. This cannot be teacher-led, it has to come from the student themselves, with guidance of course. It is why humanities degrees are sought after by key commercial employers who see the transferable skills the students have learned.
But it’s understandable why students and their parents might be disgruntled. And so it’s up to us lecturers to carry on spelling out why students are getting a great education and ensuring it is happening, even if this means having to podcast our lectures!
I am a recent graduate and I can say with confidence that I have learned more from research on blogs, twitter and online articles than anything I have read in a book. True, in some degrees this might not be the case but for the most up to date thinking in areas such as marketing, HR and the sciences online should be the main teaching material (in my opinion).
Even with only a few hours with a lecturer a week I would have greatly appreciated a blog or even a weekly e-mail with links that lecturer has found on the subject being taught.
One of the places I taught was streamlining its course offering by blending an early-to-high medieval course with a high-to-late one. The two courses both ran for two years so they had to be linked with one set of students halfway through. What this meant was that they decided to make audio recordings of the lectures that students who’d been in the ‘other’ half of the new course in their first year could check out of the library on CD-R and listen to. This would have maybe been a reasonable idea, albeit rather 1990s tech., if lectures were solely audio. I asked what was to be done with visual aids, however, and it transpired that no thought had been given to that. We were eventually allowed to put handouts on the website, but only as long as no file was over 1 Mb, which pretty much excluded Powerpoint. And, in the event, for half the lectures the AV team who were supposed to record them didn’t turn up, and the files were taken off the website when the old courses were removed from the database! What those students did I was almost glad not to have the opportunity to find out. So I hope that if your institution goes down this road they put some more thought in beforehand! There’s all kinds of ways to do this wrong.
Really, a podcast is different from a lecture. The lecturer might do better to record a rehearsal take for a podcast, because then the assumption of audience is the same, and the podcast listener won’t get actual reaction to an audience they weren’t part of, the inexplicable ‘noises off’ caused by an attempt to restring the map which has come unhooked or similar, the administrivia of lecture beginning and end. Maybe even better, because of a variety of styles of engagement, is a commented slide presentation with embedded audio, in some non-proprietary format. I’m sure the technology will continue to advance however, so better alternatives may be available very soon.