“About a year ago a research group involving four Australian universities published a report entitled The Impact of Web-Based Lecture Technologies on Current and Future Practices in Learning and Teaching. One of the key findings of this report was that students on the whole were enthusiastic about web-based lectures – i.e. lectures delivered in the traditional way but recorded for transmission on the internet – while faculty were on the whole more cautious, and a sizeable minority actually hostile. This raises the question of whether traditional teaching methods – the lecturer standing in front of a class wielding chalk and delivering talk – are still sustainable. There is a debate to be had in this about the value and appropriate use of elearning, but that is maybe for another post. My purpose here is to ask whether we need to re-consider the usefulness of the lecture in particular as a teaching tool …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 30 March]