Why do universities use lectures

Perhaps laptop-using students review and encode their notes later, after class. They might even perform better on assessments, since they have more accurate notes for review. Further, students might work harder to stay focused on the lecture, even in the face of distractions, when their grades are at stake. To capture these real-world dynamics requires randomly assigning hundreds of college students to different classroom conditions.

All students at the USMA take a semester-long, introductory economics class. The class is taught by professors in sections of no more than twenty students. Students in this introductory class all take the same multiple-choice and short-answer tests, which are administered online and graded automatically. This provides a consistent measure for comparisons of learning across sections.

The researchers randomly assigned these sections to one of three conditions: 1 electronics allowed, 2 electronics banned, and 3 tablet computers allowed, but only if laid flat on desks where professors could observe their use. Because professors at USMA teach multiple sections of the same class in a given semester, the researchers assigned each professor to more than one treatment condition. At the end of the semester, students in the classrooms where electronics were allowed had performed substantially worse, with scores 0.

There was no discernible difference between sections where tablets were allowed but restricted and those where electronics were unrestricted. In real-world education settings, a fifth of a standard deviation is a large effect. For example, the Tennessee STAR experiment found that children who were randomly assigned to smaller classrooms between kindergarten and third grade scored a fifth of a standard deviation higher than children in standard classrooms.

We can criticize the external validity of any of these studies. How relevant, after all, is the experience of cadets learning economics to community college students learning Shakespeare?

But the evidence-based strategy is not to therefore ignore the studies but to consider the specific reasons that their results would or would not extrapolate to other settings. The USMA authors argue compellingly that we would expect effects at other colleges to be, if anything, larger than those in their study. USMA courses are taught in small sections, where it is difficult for students to hide distracted computer use from their professors.

Further, USMA students have strong incentives to perform, since class rank determines who gets the first pick of jobs after graduation. The best way to settle this question of external validity, of course, is to replicate this experiment in more colleges. Until then, I find the existing evidence sufficiently compelling that I ban electronics in my classrooms.

Students with learning disabilities may need a laptop or tablet in order to participate in class. I and every teacher I know solicit and accommodate such requests. There is a loss of privacy, in that a student using a laptop is revealed as having a learning disability.

Purposes of lectures In this article, find out what is involved in a lecture is and the purpose of lectures when studying at university. Share this post. Informative and helpful 12 Feb, It covered some practical aspects as well Visit the course. In-depth and enlightening! It was definitely the right level for me, Informative course 14 Feb, Whether online or in person, lectures are common on most undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes, particularly in the arts and social science disciplines.

Want to keep learning? This content is taken from British Council online course,. This content is taken from British Council online course. See other articles from this course. This article is from the online course:. News categories. Other top stories on FutureLearn. But teaching material has long been excluded, thanks to custom and legal precedence. Where things get complicated is that universities can and do create bespoke policies to claim copyright over recorded material if they so choose.

Christopher Sprigman, a law professor at NYU specializing in intellectual property, tells The Verge that such policies are not common right now, but this is likely to change in the near future. Last year, for example, Purdue University adopted a new policy that claimed all online modules as copyrightable work belonging to the institution though individuals could negotiate specific rights agreements with the university.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed , when the pandemic hit, staff worried the same policy would be applied to all traditional classes that were now being remotely delivered. After they voiced their worries, the university stated it would not reuse their online modules without permission. People make a difference in what happens.

Without that, faculty could have potentially lost all IP rights in posting everything online in the transition to remote instruction. The UK also offers some guidance on what to expect during these sorts of negotiations. There, teaching staff have been under similar pressures as those in the US due to budget constraints and a push toward marketized education. But lecture recordings are far more common in the UK, used by roughly 70 percent of institutions as of And indeed, teaching staff reacted with such fury to the suggestions that it actually led to better policies, says Emily Nordmann, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland whose research focuses on lecture capture.

Nordmann notes that although the fear that recorded lectures will be used to break strikes is a quite specific one, it reflects anxieties about the future of higher education more generally. Recorded lectures have many benefits , making it easier for students to revisit challenging material and helping those who manage disabilities like dyslexia.