Death of the lecture greatly exaggerated, says St Andrews v-c

The lecture is “an evolutionary survivor” and will continue to have relevance to university education for a long time, a sector leader has argued.

Speaking amid debate about whether lectures will continue to be a significant part of degree-level tuition in the post-pandemic world, Sally Mapstone, principal of the University of St Andrews, said that the lecture had regularly restyled itself since the Middle Ages and would continue to do so.

“Those, like me, who believe in the value and the future of the lecture, embrace it in a range of forms,” Professor Mapstone told the Quality Assurance Agency’s annual conference.

This included the traditional one-hour lecture, which Professor Mapstone said was “pedagogically, as well as culturally, valuable to students”.

But it was also the responsibility of academics, she continued, “to refresh and restyle the lecture format as relevant”. This could be through lectures that are interspersed with chunks of time dedicated to student interaction, or the flipped classroom model, under which students watch a – sometimes pre-recorded – lecture and then discuss it afterwards.

The lecture was not as “static” a form as its critics believed, Professor Mapstone said.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic prompted a mass switch to online, many believed that the “talk and chalk” method of teaching was coming to an end in higher education, citing the benefits of more “active” learning approaches and the opportunities offered by digital technology.

A growing number of institutions, particularly in Australia, have said that they will not return to face-to-face lectures after Covid-19.

However, Professor Mapstone said that universities should not wholly dismiss the format of an expert delivering a lecture to a large group of students. Giving students “the opportunity to hear an expert at the top of their game think” was not a one-way exercise “because the experience of hearing someone brilliant think makes you think yourself”, she said.

“I want to challenge the notion that this is a kind of authoritarian and conservative position,” she said. “This kind of experience supports students by giving them an important opportunity to develop the highly transferable skill of critical listening.”

This was particularly useful for students studying the arts or humanities, Professor Mapstone argued. And it also allows them to do this as part of a community, an aspect of education that had been particularly missed by students during the pandemic, she said.

She said that data collected by St Andrews during the pandemic indicated that students frequently listened to lectures in one go, rather than breaking it up into smaller chunks.

Professor Mapstone was taking part in a session at the conference with Simone Buitendijk, vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds, and a prominent critic of the lecture. She argued that universities “need to move away from the lecture as the prime source of teaching”.

Professor Buitendijk agreed that the lecture can be a good way to inspire students. However, she said that “no matter how inspiring” a 45-minute lecture was, there was little evidence that it helped people learn.

“It's not the way to learn how to actually use facts. We need to move towards teaching that is much more multidisciplinary, more group work and more resembling of real life…We really need to think of our universities very differently,” she said.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com