Why Are We Here? (In a Big Lecture, That Is)

Why do we still have big lecture courses in universities? It is somewhat of a mystery...

The Pre-Gutenberg University:

• Universities have their origins in the medieval need of the powerful to train theologians (for the church) and to train judges (for the emperor and the kings of France, England, Castile, and other kingdoms.
• A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.
• Hence if you have a "normal" college--eight semesters, four courses a semester--and demand that people buy and read one book a course, you are talking the equivalent of $1.6M in book outlay. Can't be done.
• Hence you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them--hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader--while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever...

Then Comes Gutenberg:

• From Greg Clark: The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution: "[C]onsider the introduction of the printed book by Gutenberg in 1445, again in the period where we can find no evidence of aggregate productivity growth, at least in England.... Output per worker increased by roughly 30 fold from manuscript production in the fourteenth century till the early nineteenth century... greater than the productivity advances achieved in the cotton textile industry over the Industrial Revolution period, though it took place over a much longer period..."
• Institution of the lecture does not make its original sense.
• Why not get everybody to buy the book, read the book, and then assemble in seminars to discuss the book?
  • Almost all of us can read faster than a lecturer can talk.
  • It is much easier to index and rewind a codex than a live audio stream before the age of mechanical reproduction.

Yet the Lecture Remains: Why? Four Possible Reasons:

• Budget stringency: lectures are cheap for the university relative to seminars, and even if they are markedly less effective they do soak up students' time
• Alternative information channel: The ears are wired to the brain differently than the eyes, and there is value in not only reading something but also hearing something in producing the synaptic changes that we want to see happen in college.
• A self-discipline device: if people have to show up at a certain place at a certain time to accomplish a task or be disciplined, they are more likely to do so. Lecture as a way of solving our self-command and self-control problems.
  • But why not then just have a study hall? Everyone reads the book, and the monitor circulates and answers quetions?
• A sociological event: East African Plains Apes like to do things in groups that involve language--that is just who we are--and the lecture is just another example of this

All four of these surely play some role. But I have no idea of the relative balance between them--and neither, it seems, does anybody else I can find...

---

Early universitates magistrorum et scholarium:

848: Magnaura (Constantinople)
859: Al-Karaouine (Fez, Morocco)
975: Al-Azhar (Cairo)
1088: Bologna
1096: Oxford
1150: Sorbonne (Paris)
1175: Modena
1209: Cambridge
1218: Salamanca
1222: Padua
1224: Naples
1233: Mustansiriya (Baghdad)

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

Indeed, why not simply record your lecture and let the student listen to it from anywhere they choose. Even a live transmission could be watched on a computer anywhere. Most students do not ask questions during or after a lecture, so why the need for an audience - because the lecturer needs the audience like an actor?

Arguably, the UK's experiment with the Open University - lectures canned and transmitted worked very well, and there is a good argument to be made for the higher quality production values than can be achieved with this approach. So perhaps the problem is that it opens up a Pandora's box about how we educate and who gets rewarded. If a DeLong econ lecture becomes the definitive lecture for that topic, then we start to enter the winner takes all model that will encroach on the institution's role as an educational medium.

Are we in the Upton Sinclair mode of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."?

[Eric Ralph]

Might be worth adding Montpellier, which was certainly in place as early as 1160.

[Nicholas Weaver]

5th: You can still have interactivity.

The fraction of students who want to interact in a seminar situation is higher than in a lecture situation, but the NUMBER of students can actually be higher in a lecture situation if structured right.

Thus you can still maintain a great degree of branching, digression, interactivity, etc, even in a medium + (>100 person) lecture context.

One thing which helps is a big bag of jolly ranchers that you toss at students who ask questions, answer questions, or just don't appear to be paying attention.

[William Smith]

Prof DeLong,
Your alternate suggestion in Reason #3 does suffer because different readers read at different paces and different material is read at different paces. I can tear through Steinbeck, absorbing all the nuances and deep understanding. However, someone like Habermas or Sunstein demands a much slower pace and a much more contemplative setting.
Also, to quote Mr. Burns, "I like to put my feet up."

[In the provinces]

A good professor brings to a lecture the synthesis of a lifetime of scholarly research and reading of others' scholarly research--some of which may be in foreign languages students can't read or involving mathematics they can't understand. There's a lot of good information there, which is not otherwise available. And don't say you could find it in a textbook--there's way more info handed out in lectures over the course of the semester than could be written down in a textbook. I know, because I have written a textbook (2, actually) covering one semester's worth of lecturing, and I had to leave an awful lot out.

[Sonja]

I vote for reason 2, and the reason given by In the provinces.
My brother is just now starting his third year of college. He's been getting good grades, but apparently he has not read even one complete book since leaving high school. He has always read slowly and with difficulty. At first I was horrified, and surprised, because he seems to be able to talk intelligently about his subject. I still am annoyed, but I figured, if he's writing all the right things in his papers, then he must be learning something from his teacher. And that's ok too I guess.
As for In the provinces, when I was in college, I avoided classes where the professor let my classmates share their useless interpretations of the text. I went there to be inducted into a discipline, to learn the standard interpretations. I wasn't paying to hear other students talk.

[kharris]

Making education a method of delivering the content books obscures reality. Lecturing in the form of reading has given way to lecturing in the form of commenting on the reading, or using the reading as a supplement to the lecture. So while it is true that "The ears are wired to the brain differently than the eyes, and there is value in not only reading something but also hearing something" we have gone well beyond that. Lecturers worth their salt are distilling their own vast exposure to a subject and either providing mental hooks on which to hang the reading, or using the mental hooks provided by the reading to make their own comments stick.

We humans have a very strong set of social responses. We don't just "interact" in the sense that characters representing our question showing up in a screen, followed by characters representing an informed answer to our questions. We interact through eye contact, body language, tone of voice - you know the list. All of that stuff provides the emotional context for the learning. Emotion is a huge factor in memory, even in memory of dry fact. We social animals need human contact. We make the subject matter important by making the lecturer important. We do that by putting the lecturer in the room with the learner.

The mistaken intellectual model of the cosmos and of man back in the early days of clockwork mechanisms was that of the clockwork. Now, in this day of information processing, the mistaken intellectual model of the cosmos and of man is that of the information processing device. We have fallen for the same trick again. Humans are not reflections of the latest technology. We are what we are, and merely mistake ourselves for the latest technology. If we can reduce the noise and streamline the flow of information so that it fits the available technology in ever better ways, we will have validated the new model. In the process, we will have completely screwed up education, among other things.

[Bernard Yomtov]

A possible 6th. Don't some faculty simply prefer lecturing?

[stefan]

Giving lectures is part of the iterative production process of writing books and papers. And if the good professors writing books give lectures, then the bad professors not writing books have to give lectures as well.

[john]

If you read a book and you don't understand something, you're stuck unless you buy more books and happen to find a good explanation of just that thing in one. Very, very inefficient, relative to just raising your hand and asking a question.

Study hall isn't so efficient either; everyone sits around waiting for their turn to ask their questions, and learning very little from the questions that others are asking to which they already know the answer.

OTOH, I took Econometrics II from Henri Theil, who really did sit at the front of the room reading from his book. He hardly ever got up to draw the pictures on the board, instead we just followed along in the text. He was a believer in students learning from the literature and just talking to professors if they had questions or needed guidance in their research, but U of C forced him to lecture, so that's how he did it.

[Donald A. Coffin]

I think one answer that's overlooked is this:

We teach as we have been taught.

And, for most of us in most of our lives as students, that has meant being in lecture classes. As teachers we then reproduce the experience we have had.

A second possibility:

Lecturing is (relatively) easier to learn how to do than are most of the alternatives. Moving away from lecture-focused classes means training new faculty, and retraining existing faculty, in different modes of interaction with students. For new faculty, this would somehow have to be done within their disciplinary graduate programs. For existing faculty, especially those of us who are tenured, we'd have to be convinced that the new modes work and then learn how to do something that is both new and in many ways harder.

The changes will come, however. Slowly, and probably not by the time I retire, but they will come.

[eugene]

echoing 'in the provinces' and 'sonja', a lecture is more and less than a text. a student opening a text normally assumes he/she should start at the beginning and read all the way through, or else they search through the text looking for the important points without real guidance. a great student can learn all they need this way; most will only get part of what they need. a lecturer's job is to work with the text or texts and choose the topics which are important and explain the bits that are tricky. the lecturer can go into more detail, and interactively, in areas where the texts are weak or opaque. The text remains available for more study and for paths beyond the leture's core.

[Maynard Handley]

"But I have no idea of the relative balance between them--and neither, it seems, does anybody else I can find..."

Brad, if you are seriously interested in this, you should speak to Carl Wieman. You may or may not know the name, but Wieman won the 2001 Nobel in Physics, and then became intensely interested in how to teach (especially how to teach physics to undergrads), and treated the problem like a physicist would --- relying on measurement and data rather than simply assuming that his pet theory of education had to be correct, and that if it gave bad results it was because "society" and "culture" were to blame.
Wieman is currently at UBC, and while I doubt he would answer my phone calls, he'd probably answer yours. I suspect (given the way he has talked in the past) that he'd probably be thrilled to discuss with you his experimental methodology and love to have his ideas tested in a different environment on a different subject.

You can hear him discuss what he is on about here:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=95882746&s=143441&i=1556149

The bottom line is that (for teaching undergrads physics concepts; quite possibly a discursive subject like history is very different), raw lectures are pretty much useless, as are poorly constructed problem sets, but the situation can be improved substantially through rethinking what one is trying to achieve, and restructuring the lecture appropriately. Wieman is especially fond of using clickers throughout the lecture to constantly get students to reflect on what they have just heard and what it actually means, and claims he has the evidence that this works really well. (Sort of an aggregated socratic method.)
(On the other hand, I imagine a lecture conducted in this manner would not make for good listening on my iPod, so perhaps I shouldn't welcome it becoming popular!)

[Ginger Yellow]

Crossposted from Yglesias's place:
Um, maybe it's different on the continent, but in the UK, the pre-Gutenburg universities don't use the large lecture format (for the arts), they use tutorials supplemented by lectures (which you can comfortably skip). It's the newer universities (and the sciences everywhere) that teach predominantly by lecture. Furthermore, at Oxford we read a hell of a lot more than one book a course. More like two plus books a week, plus secondary material.

[Ginger Yellow]

To be clear, "tutorials" are roughly equivalent to Brad's "seminars", with roughly 2-10 students depending on the course and college.

[Esque]

As someone who just got done with a lecture in a humanities subfield delivered to a class in which 320 are enrolled (but not all showed up), I will proffer that the answer in my case is 99% budget stringency (translate: enrollment-based budgeting at a large state university), and 1% the other stuff.

[Gene O'Grady]

I don't think what the medieval church looked for from the universities was nearly so much theologians (troubling then as now) as administrators.

[derek]

What happened around 1210, for five of the universities on your list to appear within a quarter century? Taking the list as definitive and not just examples, the "number of universities" growth rate seems to have shot up from 0.22% per year to 0.78% per year.

[derek]

Sorry, from 0.5% to 1.8%. Stupid common logarithms.

[erewhon]

Excellent work. Add to this the high percentage of modern students who are texting, sleeping, surfing the internet during lectures. Why not have a series of podcasts and then obligatory meetings with TAs (the prof would be better) to discuss the lectures?

[Tony P.]

"Output per worker" is an interesting concept in what Tom Lehrer used to call "the ed biz". Output is presumably educated students; worker is presumably faculty member. Are economies of scale either possible or desirable in the ed biz?

A fine restaurant is "fine" partly because it employs platoons of tuxedoed waiters to give its customers excruciatingly personal service. Your average cafeteria could serve equally tasty and nutritious food, at much lower cost. Are professors (or teachers generally) waiters or cooks?

--TP

[Michael Drake]

Generalizing from points made by Nicholas, Eugene, ITP and sonja, above, there's more than one way to read a book, and a lecture is not a bad place to encounter other (and often better) ways of reading the book.

[md 20/400]

"What happened around 1210"?

Semi-WAG. Could be the 4th Lateran Council (1215). European justice changed when clerics were no longer allowed to assist at trials by ordeal. How the English got the jury trial in criminal cases.

[bobk]

In biology and clinical chemistry lectures I give, I use the lecture time to dissect specific new applications of theory, cover items right out of the news, and give info and data on subjects that will not be in the textbooks for at least another year or two. I and some of my colleagues have found that this is also a way to pique students interest in our particular fields of science as a career not just a way to meet core curriculum demands
It's a break-neck pace in discovery out there and if I left my students to only textbooks they would be way behind the knowledge curve.

[Jim]

As a rather naive small town midwesterner going East to school in the mid sixties, going from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond, I decided to major in poly sci as a freshman thinking the material must be similar to the Drew Pearson columns I read and enjoyed. In Poly Sci 1, I read the assignment, Plato's Republic, which was not as easy as reading Pearson. The lecture in the large hall was delivered by Herbert Marcuse. Alot of sentences with the words "faculties" and "potentialities" delivered in a strong German accent. Had we read the same book? He also led my group seminar. I did learn from the immaculately groomed Marcuse that one could be a Marxist (I began to understand what he was talking about when we came to read Marx 3/4 of the way through the year)and not be required to wear a blue work shirt, heans, and matching jacket.

[Leila Abu-Saba]

Fascinating topic and comment thread; quite an education. I knew a little of the history of the university in the West but I didn't have so many details on the rise of the lecture vs. the tutorial/seminar.

May I add to your list of early universities the law university at Berytus, Laodicea in Canaan, or present day Beirut, which according to Wikipedia was already well-known in C.E. 14, and was destroyed by earthquake in the mid-sixth century.

From Wikipedia: "Two of Rome's most famous jurists, Papinian and Ulpian, both natives of Phoenicia, taught at the law school under the Severan emperors. When Justinian assembled his Pandects in the 6th century, a large part of the corpus of laws were derived from these two jurists, and Justinian recognized the school as one of the three official law schools of the empire (533). Within a few years, as the result of a disastrous earthquake (551), the students were transferred to Sidon."

The Sidonian branch petered out in the general disarray of the 6th and early 7th centuries. I read about what happened to the law school in Sidon once but would have to go back and find the book, can't remember the history. Nobody but us Sidonians really cares...Still I'd like to know how this all fit in with the timeline of the early Arab conquest and rise of the Caliphate.

[Leila Abu-Saba]

I'm at home at the moment, can't go check in a musty university library, but have a correction to the Wikipedia info. A website devoted to Phoenician studies dates the beginning of the law university at Berytus to about C.E. 250, not C.E. 14.

[jim]

There are two distinct questions wrapped up together here: (1) Why might University faculty choose to use some of their classroom time to lecture; (2) Why do University administrators create and schedule courses where lecture is the obligate method of teaching: classes of 100, 200, 300 students per teacher. Most of the commenters are answering the first question; I think Brad is mostly asking the second.

[Doctor Jay]

We still go to concerts, even though we can buy CD's and videos of all our favorite musicians. That's Brad's point 4 at work, I guess.

I think that students like being in a room with someone who really knows what's going on, thinks its really cool, and communicates that enthusiasm. They want to be motivated. Discussion sections don't work with undergraduate students, particularly underclasses, since they don't quite yet have either the passion or the courage to speak up.

I know of a professor who could fill a 500 seat lecture hall at 7:30 with his lectures on Physical Chemistry, freshman level. Because he could make it all seem worth getting up and coming. Maybe that's Brad's point 4, but "we like things that involve spoken language" doesn't quite cover it for me.

[M. Carey]

"What happened around 1210"?
This was the culmination of what is generally known as the the "12th Century Renaissance" (=1100s). There was a relatively prosperous "peaceful" time; the Barons and the Church needed more administrators, and these people were trained at Paris and elsewhere. Strayer (date??) and others have written on the history of Universities.

[Pquincy]

Having just gotten a second administrative notice after a departmental review that my department needs to cut back on our use of 'lecturers' -- i.e., we need to teach ~2x the students we had in 1998 with the ~1x the faculty, rather than hiring proletarian faculty to avert the burden from the privileged tenured faculty, which translates to "teach more large classes" -- it's hard to dismiss the fiscal pressure for more and larger lecture courses. (This is after we already cut back our undergraduate seminars and increased our large upper division courses, by the way.)

But I have a different point: I very much doubt that Abelard, one of the most celebrated lecturers in medieval European university history, ever just 'read' the text he was lecturing on. Nor does a good lecturer, today (which is not to say that all professors and lecturers are good). Lecturing is a genuinely different channel and genre of teaching than a textbook, a book-length study, a cluster of articles, or a structured web lesson.

Recent experience suggests that neither lectures nor textbooks are the single most effective way of teaching procedural skills (basic and mid-level math, for example). But for teaching something complex, say, political economy or economic history, I suspect that lecturing offers a distinctive advantage that neither textbooks nor any imaginable assigned reading can: a good lecturer, it seems to me, performs the intellectual and disciplinary skills that s/he is trying to convey. That involves laying out the questions and the available evidence, then self-consciously synthesizing and building an explanation.

Textbooks do try to do this, but they fail because they are not 'live', and do not invoke our performance-interpreting cognitive modules. These modules, since we are social animals, are highly developed but don't translate well to a reading media context. After all, for the vast majority of our history the main way that adult East African plains apes taught younger band members all sorts of things--from which food to eat and where to find it to how to play tribal politics and succeed socially--was performative explanation (show and tell), and parents and schoolteachers do it with kids every day. Why should this be different with college students?

It's no surprise, therefore, as a general rule with stunningly few exceptions, that all textbooks are boring. Even good ones, well written, etc., because even though they include the process of framing questions, laying out evidence, and performing synthesis, they are incapable of triggering the right cognitive response from human readers.

I'm very curious to learn whether interactive tools driven by computer can succeed at this, where books as a rule fail. To do so, I would guess, they must invoke the same performative-explanation model that good lecturing does. Right now, making that work costs more than hiring a professor, but that may not stay true for long.

[Pquincy]

"What happened around 1210?"

Another theory is in R I Moore's _The Formation of a Persecuting Society_, for which 1210 or so is the endpoint of a process of formalization and and institutionalization of power that began around 950 or so.

Heretics, lepers, and other 'deviants' came to be rigorously defined and excluded (both by popular wish and by official procedure). And yes, all this required people with disciplined minds to carry out, and brought new attention to technologies of knowledge for managing society.

St. Dominic introduces the preaching-carrot-and-inquisition-stick method to Languedoc starting right around 1210, for example: lure the general population, which doesn't really know what to believe, with well-trained preachers with tested and proven rhetorical techniques, while simultaneously ratcheting up surveillance and pressure on those who refuse to bow to the Church's authority, for whatever reason (backed up by the friendly assistance of the French Crown when trouble arises).

[Devo]

I think there's a key problem with your question. Students just aren't the same as a block as they were when the Universitaat Wuerzburg opened its doors -- mostly because such a large percentage of the populace went. The handful who had university training in the 1400's were a fraction of the larger population and vastly better educated; today, the percentage of students going to school is exponentially higher. (It's not, of course, a question of intelligence, but a question of self-selection and motivation.) Combine that with how much more distracting the world is today -- you've sometimes got three of four kinds of media competing for your students attention _in the same class_ and you've got a recipe for disaster. In my experience (three years lecturing at a state school recently), all of this elevates the third rationale you offer over the other three at the majority of universities, in the majority of courses. In a lecture, you can decrease the bandwidth on distractions *and* drill in the necessity of keeping up with the work, particularly if you're interactive and call on them regularly. 90% of students don't come to office hours, don't seek out one-on-one attention, and yet, will highly rate the importance of a low student to teacher ratio. I suspect a large part of it is that they want to feel someone's eyes on them to make sure they'll do the work (and to motivate them to impress). It's a bit panopticonish, but it rings true to me and to my experiences as a student in liberal arts and science lectures in the early 00s. The problem with digital lectures is that they'd be like books on tape. Without someone breathing to personally crack some sort of whip, I don't think most students would do as well.

[peter]

Your analysis ignores something fundamental about the medieval university. A university education before the Enlightenment did not simply fill the heads of students with facts (whether obtained directly from a rare book or from someone reading of a rare book). A university education also trained students in the key skills (the arts) required by society of its judges and theoologians: making speeches in public, debating and arguing propositions with others, and generally engaging in intellectual discourse in a mostly non-literate society. These were all speaking skills rather than writing skills.

These skills were not something -- and still are not something -- it is possible to acquire from a book, no matter how cheaply produced. Indeed, it is barely possible to acquire these skills from one other person, no matter how renowned that person be a famous professor. Rather, one acquires these speaking and argumentation skills only through verbal interactions with many other people. Most students at medieval universities spent most of their time not in lectures, hearing texts read to them, but in dialectical disputations with fellow students. I realize this may shock a good professor at a renowned American university, but the key benefits to a student of a university education in the medieval period -- as is also the case with MBA programs now! -- were gained from one's fellow participants, not from one's professors.

It is easy in our text-dominated society to forget that the majority of cultures, both present-day and historically, were dominated by speech, not by text. It is interesting to note that Cambridge University only introduced written exams for the Mathematics Tripos in the late 18th century, and it did so over strong objections from the faculty. (One objection was: How could exams possibly be fair if all students are asked exactly the same questions? ) It is still the case that higher mathematics is mostly examined orally, not via written exam, in the countries of the former USSR. We should not allow the overwhelming text-dominance of contemporary western culture to blind us to other modes of knowledge representation, reasoning and reproduction.

[Ginger Yellow]

"Discussion sections don't work with undergraduate students, particularly underclasses, since they don't quite yet have either the passion or the courage to speak up."

The Oxbridge/Durham/some other universities experience suggests otherwise. Now you can convincingly argue that those aren't representative samples of undergrads, but: a) Oxbridge students these days aren't on average that much more confident when they matriculate than other undergrads in the UK (after graduation is another matter), and b) I find it hard to believe that they are more confident/passionate than Ivy league students in the US. Maybe the UK system of early specialisation is more conducive to seminars/tutorials, because students are more deeply and widely read in their degree subject by the time they reach university. Still, I would hope that someone majoring in a subject would be able and willing to have a thoughtful discussion about it, even if they're fairly new to it.

That still doesn't explain why Brad's Gutenberg reasoning is reversed for UK universities, though.

[bakho]

The Big Lecture is a giant "academic pep rally".

Your job as professor is to motivate your students to do the reading AND to focus their deficit attention on the salient points that are central to the discipline. If you are just reading or just "lecturing" you are not earning your keep. You need to be motivating the students and engaging them in the process of building the internal mental framework necessary for understanding and challenging them. The Big Lecture also provides students with a meeting place to find study partners, form study groups form team projects and network with their fellow students. (And a chance to meet that cute girl or guy). The Big Lecture should challenge students to test their reading comprehension by being able to hear discourse on the subject they study.

The Big Lecture is a creature of the BIg University. Typically universities try to put their best teachers and scholars in front of the most students in order to motivate the students and demonstrate scholarship by example. Students must understand that books are written by people who at one time were students just like them but through scholarship and hard work have achieved a level of excellence and mastery of their subject.

[Gene O'Grady]

Devo,

If you read the letters of Erasmus (or the arguments at the Council of Trent) you won't be so sure that the students in the olden good old days were so much better than the current breed.

[P.M.Lawrence]

"Universities have their origins in the medieval need of the powerful to train theologians (for the church) and to train judges (for the emperor and the kings of France, England, Castile, and other kingdoms".

Wrong, actually. Those are the things that caused them to grow and flourish, but in general they are not their origin. They originated in bands of roaming scholars who had come together for mutual support, then went foraging for sustenance - often literally (this model still survives, as when Peter Dixon took his troupe of itinerant economists with him from one university to another). From time to time they found patrons who endowed and privileged them as colleges for the above reasons, then as they settled down universities came about through an emergent process.

[Ken Muldrew]

"What happened around 1210?"

Is it a coincidence that the pressing need for more administrators arose at the same time that mechanical clocks started appearing in Europe? Guns, germs, steel...and clocks?

[douglas]

For all the fluff about lectures being a different medium, etc., in practice every economics lecture I attended through four years of undergrad and seven years grad school was a waste of time. In grad, the lectures just reiterate Mas-Colell, or whatever text is in style. Learning math in lecture is like learning karate by sitting in a lecture. You learn it only by doing it.

Teaching undergrades, professors generally use slides provided by the textbook publisher. So much for "the synthesis of a lifetime of scholarly research." Remember your last time lecturing in front of a bunch of econ undergrads, in intermediate whatever. Of the 30% of the class present, how many are asleep? How many on MSN? If you have no attentive students in a class of 200, it's pretty good evidence that the lecture is useless.

[divF]

In mathematics as practiced at the research level, lectures are an essential complement to the text sources (i.e. the research literature). The text sources are written in a style required by the need to present formal proofs of theorems. Such a style is incompatible with the presenting a complex web of examples, counterexamples, and heuristic arguments that might motivate the approach to proving a theorem, but which by themselves are not proofs. There is a particular reluctance to present this "backstory" in textual presentations for fields that are rapidly evolving: it may be incomplete, or even incorrect, even though the proofs themselves are correct. In practice, the communication of this contextual information in all of its detail is transmitted orally, through lectures and workshops. Even after fields mature, you find only a few gifted individuals who are up to the task of presenting the contextual information integrated with the formal proofs in a sufficiently economical way as to make it presentable in text form.

[Devo]

Gene--

>If you read the letters of Erasmus (or the arguments at the Council of >Trent) you won't be so sure that the students in the olden good old days >were so much better than the current breed.

I believe you -- but that's like Plato lamenting that the youth are just too wild in his time. It establishes some continuity in their behavior relative to everyone else, but doesn't say anything about how their behavior compares directly (how could it?). And (though it's speculation) I think they were probably more studious, in relative terms, than students today -- because it was much rarer to go to University, and they had fewer distractions. Sure, even monks were hardly saints (or so Rabelais, Boccaccio, etc. suggest) and binge drinking was common. But not IM, cell phones, cable T.V., online gaming, etc.

Anyway, any excuse to go back and read some Erasmus is worth it.

[Florentin Blanc]

There are lots of reasons why this system has persisted, even though it is exactly true that it appeared for reasons long gone...All the reasons listed in the post are valid, as are many from the comments. One also should not forget that a (good) lecture is a live moment, not reading a book (not anymore - if it ever was just this, which I doubt - what memoirs from the Renaissance say about the best masters from, say, the Sorbonne, does not hint at simple "reading from the book", but at real live teaching). The master's latest thinking, and all his/her love for the topic and flame should/can/may go through...feedback and participation also happen. And the theatrical element can often be essential to keeping attention awake and thus enabling assimilation. When I watch a lecture on video/webstream I just doze off and start doing something else. Lectures are a specific medium, even though I have to agree that the seminar is in most ways superior. It is far more expensive, and requires more work from the seminar leader, though...which may also be a good reason lectures still exist!

[Commentator]

To learn students uses the following in varying amounts (depending on the subject, student's learning style, quality of materials):

1. Reading (books, notes, etc.).
2. Hearing (an expert discuss/explain).
3. Watching (an expert do).
4. Doing (assignments etc.).
5. Interacting (with teacher and fellow learners).

Lectures cover 2 & 3, but are more than simply an exercise in reading aloud a text because they provides context, editorial comments, current examples, demonstrations, etc. (What they don't provide is an environment for student/teacher interaction -- clickers or no clickers.) Thus lectures still remain valuable learning tool in the post-Gutenberg era. The question that still remains is that are LIVE lectures still efficient, any more than hand copied manuscripts were efficient after the printing press? Is the Cal Math 1A lecture really than different from the ones being given at other good schools? If Cal is willing to use a book that it didn't write for its Math 1A students then why does it have to produce the 2x32 live lecture performances every year? Even if somehow the Cal performances are sui generis, how about replaying the recorded ones from last year (surely much of the undergrad material, or even the best way to lecture it, doesn't change much in a year).

Maybe we could have a hybrid text/video-lecture/seminar model where the student reads some text and watches a polished video lecture (with great graphics and outside video), and then sits down in a room for a few hours a week with a teacher and fellow learners in for directed discussion and, where relevant, labs or problem solving sessions. It seems that the most non-scalable input is the time of a good teacher to provide (semi-)individual coaching -- I'm sure Brad will have no problem if I read his books or watch his lectures, but having him personally tutor me might be another matter.

[pietro]

the lecture reinforces the "banking model" of education and places the teacher/professor at the center of learning. if the goal of the lecture is the medieval one--giving students access to a rare and precious text--then this makes sense. as a student, i want the lecturer to pronounce the text clearly and accurately so that i can inscribe my own sheet of vellum with fidelity. but i wonder if the texts that dominate our current version of the lecture--powerpoint bulleted lists--justify this kind of reverential copying. certainly many final exams have been designed that attempt to provide justification, but i suppose im asking about justifications that go beyond the bounds of the course and its credentialling functions. it seems to me that most modern understandings of "learning" involve problem solving or operations above and beyond memorizing strings of language or numbers. if a lecture is the best way to help students learn, then it should be encouraged. but im suspicious...

[degustibus]

In the words of a famous educator and decider, Is our students learning?

One way to find out: Let the student purchase a degree at the time of enrollment. Then the true touchstone of motivation to learn would be if the student wants to stick around and take classes. Of course the school would have to give competency tests in order to activate the degree -- similar to Windows activation. But the competency tests would not be tied to lectures.

There would of course be those P2P hackers who would seek ways to cheat and bypass activation, but I'm certain those in higher education would quickly find creative ways to thwart such miscreants.

[Renay]

Prof.

I think that you analysis is excellent.

However is it not Euro-centric?

Surely there were universities in India or China before Christianity?

In India this must have been the place where mathematics (Pythagoras theorem was used, even before Pythagoras, and the current Hindu numerals) was created.

Regards
Renay

[Don Cox]

"Why not get everybody to buy the book"

What book? None of the courses I teach has a standard text book, and I would typically have to refer to six or more, as well as web sites and my own material, when preparing a new lecture.

Many subjects, such as science/technology and design/art need practical lab or studio sessions more than they need lectures - but there is still a use for lectures as an efficient way to get some ideas across to all the students at once.

[historylecturer]

This is a subject that interests me greatly for I regularly hear about the decline of the lecture and about how "useless" this medium is becoming in education. I still rely on it 100%, though, because of my situation. I teach US surveys. Many of my students have not studied US history in years (often they last had the subject in early high school) and do not know even the basics of our nation's past. Many also share the dilemma mentioned above in that they have not read a monograph in their lives. I give them the best performance I can, describing the different interpretations, being irreverent, teaching study skills along with facts, and incorporating a lot of technology with slick pictures and movie clips -- all in an effort to re-introduce them to the subject in a scholarly and exciting way.
Were I to turn the class into a discussion or seminar (mine are small enough for this), what would we discuss? They've got no experience dealing with monographs, don't know the facts, are often very intimidated by the subject, or have the high school "I hate history and don't want to study it" mentality. I've tried for years to figure out what to do in class, other than lecture, but have never come up with anything remotely as effective for covering the information, the theories, the nature of historical scholarship. Does anyone have any insights into what can be tried in a situation like mine? (Sorry if this sounds like a thread hijack!)

[Anthony D'Amatoa]

When law schools started in the 19th century, students read texts on law (like Blackstone's Commentaries) and professors lectured. Then along came Christopher Columbus Langdell, a new instructor at Harvard Law School. He was like a visitor from outer space. He had the students read actual cases, and instead of lecturing, asked them questions. The students were outraged, and they began leaving his lectures. Students said something like "students don't know the law, the professors do, and yet this guy wants us to tell him what the law is." "How can we know what the law is when we've paid tuition for professors to tell us what it is?" Langdell's class attendance dropped from 60 to about 5, yet the 5 were stalwarts. They "got it."

What was there to get? The majority of students wanted answers; they wanted to know what the law was.

But law isn't about answers, it's about questions. A practicing lawyer can always look up answers, but he has to know what questions to ask. So Langdell was actually teaching them how to ask questions, what kinds of questions to ask, etc.

Langdell's method eventually caught on. It was called the "Socratic" method, though it wasn't quite what Socrates did.

However, we are seeing a resurgence of lecturing. Asking questions has proved too embarassing to special-admission students when they are called on, yet not to call on them brings up charges of discrimination.

So some of the best questioners in the professorial ranks have become lecturers. Professor DeLong is right about them. I think that unless there is some kind of interactivity in the classroom, all lectures can be recorded. Better yet, they can be put in DVDs so that students who need to see faces talking can see faces talking as well as listening to what the faces say.

Lectures should be abolished altogether. Good learning programs can be devised where students have to get through the program before they can attend a seminar. No need for grades; students can take ten years getting through if that's what they want to do. The program can have batches of text taken from the former lectures, followed by questions to test whether the student has comprehended the text.

[peter]

Henry Adams [1905] in "The Education of Henry Adams" (p. 789, The Library of America, 1983), writing of his time as a student at the University of Berlin in 1858:

"... but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture-system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The Professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a Degree. To an American the result was worthless."

[ian]

Thinking back to being an undergraduate, I found the large first year lectures an excellent introduction to their subject, with the lecturers able to give us a far better sketchy overview of their subjects than we would have got from a book.