Tag: lectures

Teaching Tip: Lecturing in Your OM Class

lecture“Research has long cast doubt on the use of lecture in education,” writes Faculty Focus (July 15, 2015). The book What’s the Use of Lecture? claims the biggest benefit of lecture is that it is an efficient means of reaching a large number of students in a single setting. Lectures convey information but they do little to promote thought or problem-solving abilities, or to change behavior. Despite the evidence about lecture’s weaknesses, 2/3-3/4 of faculty members continue to rely on it. As Harvard’s Derek Bok argues, though facts, theories, and concepts delivered in lecture have little value unless students can apply them to new situations, ask pertinent questions, make reasoned judgments, and arrive at meaningful conclusions. Another prof puts it this way: “You may have a lecture that works to get students to take a multiple choice test really effectively. But when you have a conversation with that student after your semester, they may not actually remember anything.”

Transforming a class, especially a large lecture class, isn’t easy–and the adjustments in an active learning class can be difficult for students, as well. Millennials have a deep fear of failure–and do not deal well with ambiguity. They like clean, firm solutions to OM problems–not thinking beyond a single “right answer.”  Students have grown accustomed to sitting passively in lectures, reviewing your notes or slides posted online, attending study sessions, cramming for exams, and moving on. Many resent having to take an active role in class. Even so, a common complaint is not that professors are too demanding but that they don’t hold firmly to deadlines and expectations.

What can Jay and I do to help?  Our Instructors Resource Manual provides classroom exercises for every topic. The Teaching Tips button on this blog provides more ideas for involving students. The 35 videos we made can be shown and lead to discussions in class. The OM in the News blogs provide current topics to share with your class each day so they feel there is practicality to OM. Perhaps you have an exercise you would like to share with colleagues. Just write to me (brender@rollins.edu) and I will post it for everyone to read.

 

Teaching Tip: Dealing With Student Cellphone Use During Your OM Lectures

cellphonesStudents and their devices have become virtually inseparable, writes Faculty Focus (Jan. 8, 2014). They are using them constantly and find it difficult to disconnect for any amount of time. When they’re texting, looking at Facebook, or cruising on the Internet and listening to your OM lecture and trying to take notes, they aren’t dealing with the content as well as they would be if they just focused on listening and note taking. And the evidence of that keeps accumulating. The research below found: “. . . students who use their mobile phones during class lectures tend to write down less information, recall less information, and perform worse on tests than those who abstain from using their mobile phones during class.”

Can we get students to put away their phones and focus on learning? Even with a policy and overt attempts to enforce it, without constant surveillance, it is very, very difficult to ensure that students are not using their devices. If your class is large, it is all but impossible. And that kind of vigilant enforcement is not without costs to you as enforcer.

Here is an alternative: Give your normal presentation in class. Then 5 minutes before class ends, distribute or post a list of your 5 or 6 essential points made. Students could check their notes, or you could have students trade notes so that someone else is doing the checking, and see how many of those points they had. Some students may miss a few of the points because they aren’t all that good at taking notes. But were some of the students who missed most (all) of the points also texting or surfing during class? Encourage them to ask themselves the question and to look honestly at the evidence revealed by their notes. No, you aren’t going to be providing one of these lists at the end of every class, but you may consider doing it sometime during the next couple of weeks as the new semester begins. And if students are really interested in knowing how texting affects what they’re getting out of class, they should try listening and taking notes without doing anything else.

Reference: Kuznekoff. J. H. and Titsworth, S. (2013). The impact of mobile phone usage on student learning. Communication Education, 62 (3), 233-252.