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| FOSDEM 2008 (Wikipedia) |
Traditional lectures should be phased out as academics embrace technology to “liberate” students from out-of-date styles of teaching, a university leader said yesterday.
This is from the Times …
Academics could introduce “flip lectures” by asking students to watch a video of a talk or experiment beforehand and answer questions or convene a discussion in the lecture hall. Don Nutbeam, vice-chancellor of the University of Southampton, told a conference that moves by leading academics in America to post course material free online would hasten this change.
“I don’t meet many students who say, I am really looking forward to being crowded into a lecture theatre with 200 or 300, sometimes 400 other students and listen at a distance to a lecturer,” Professor Nutbeam said.
“That’s not a common comment on most university campuses. What students place high value on is quality programme time, interactive content time with the academic community.”
This was echoed by Mark Taylor, dean of Warwick Business School, who told the conference: “Seminars and lectures are medieval concepts. They were introduced in medieval Europe and haven’t changed much in 700 or 800 years.”
The conference, hosted in London by Universities UK, was called to consider the popularity of free online courses offered by many of America’s leading universities, such as Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A group of 21 leading British universities has responded with plans for free online courses led by the Open University.
Professor Nutbeam said that campus universities would be forced to rethink what they offered, especially with fees of £9,000 a year, as millions of people were able to sign up to free higher education courses anywhere in the world.
More at: ‘Medieval’ lectures could be replaced by free online courses (subscription required)
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