Title of Paper: Diversity and Difference in Adult Education : Diversity and Differences in How Lecturers’ Perceive the Function of Lectures in Australia andScotland

Name of author, institution, country

Peter Sutherland

Institute of Education

University of Stirling

Scotland

Paper presented at the 35th Annual SCUTREA Conference July 5-July 7 2005, University of Sussex, England, UK

Introduction: How is the Nature of the Lecture Changing?

This paper discusses differences and diversity in how lecturers in Australia and Scotland perceive the lecture as an educational format and how it can be developed to serve the needs of adult students.

In 2005 the traditional lecture remains the main means of education at university. Is it this acceptable at a time of incredible technological innovation? Should the traditional lecture not be replaced by modern alternatives such as e-learning, Power Point presentation of the lecture online, video-presentation by the world’s expert? Or alternatively it could be replaced by andragogical alternatives such as Brookfield’s (1986) self-directed learning?

The needs of lifelong learning should be examined in this context. Are the needs of mature learners (possibly admitted from Wider Access courses) adequately met by the traditional lecture or are some of the modern alternatives more appropriate?

We are re-examining the question Bligh (2002) asked many years ago: What’s the use of lectures? But we are doing so with a particular focus on adult students.

These important research questions for lifelong learning are being answered by a project on lecturers’ perception of the lecture as a format in education.

Research in Australia

This year a study of 15 lecturers at 3 different Australian universities has been carried out. Two of the universities were in large cities:

1. The Queenland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane.

2. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Both have a special mission to cater for the needs of mature students who did not attend university at the traditional age.

The other was in a large rural town:

3. The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Toowoomba. Here the emphasis was on Distance Education. It has a special role as it is the last university in the east followed in the west by several hundreds of miles of bush, etc. before Darwin and the next university is reached. It caters for the needs of lifelong learning in general and adult education in particular.

Although Australian lecturers generally put even more emphasis on the traditional lecture format than their Scottish counterparts, this was allied to considerable technological innovation e.g. the presentation of a wide range of relevant text on screens. This would seem more appropriate for the needs of the lifelong learner.

Case studies in the teaching of adults:

Out of the 15 interviewees 6 perceptions of the role of the lecturer of particular interest for adult education emerged:

1. An Interacter

Lecturer A lectured in an adult education context to mature students who were at least 21 years, but who are mainly in their 30’s and 40’s. She believed in minimising the lecture element: 20 minutes maximum and even this is interactive. She did not want them to take notes. Her emphasis was on group work for which she set them problems to work on.

2. A Believer in the Efficacy of Lecturing

In contrast with her, Lecturer B totally rejected the andragogy of Knowles (1982) and the self-directed learning of Brookfield (1986). He believed passionately in the traditional lecture. For example he delivered lectures to classes of about 30 adult education students such as plumbers, welders and police people. He divided up the 3 hours into two 1 hour 20 minute lectures with a 20 minute break in the middle. He believed that adult students want structure in lectures above all else.

3. The Pastoral Role: The Lecturer as a Developer of Character

Lecturer C believed that sincerity is crucial. The values of the lecturer must become the values of the students. The lecturer should be a role model for the students and not just a transmitter of information.

He regarded the prime role of the lecturer as helping students to mature. This applied particularly to some adult students who enter university with very weak academic skills. They need all the maturity can manage in order to cope with undergraduate study.

In order to perform this role a lecturer needs to teach the whole of a course themselves, rather than having a team of individual lecturers contribute 1 or 2 lectures on their field of expertise. This enables them to get to know the students individually. He was referring to classes of 35-40 since, of course, this would not be possible with huge lecture groups of hundreds or thousands.

He adopted a very Australian attitude of offering all students at the outset a “fair go”. In other words he knew nothing about them and he encouraged them to make an impression on him. It is hard to reconcile this approach with his pastoral approach. If he was to help them to mature, it would be expected that he would need to know as much about them as individuals as possible.

4 A Teacher of Skills as the Core Activity of Lectures

Lecturer D was mainly involved with lecturing to adult students who themselves teach a skill e.g. plumbing. He believed that simply to talk at adult students was not educationally productive. This was particularly true when the adult students had limited language ability in listening and writing notes. He put the emphasis on demonstrating the skill he was teaching. This was followed-up by small group work in carefully planned tutorials which are not merely repetitions of the lectures. In addition there is micro-teaching where the adult students themselves demonstrated the skill to their peers.

This is only a summary of the research on learning to learn skills about which Lecturer D i.e. Cornford (2002) has written more widely.

5. A Believer in Using the Visual Literacy of Adult Students

The current generation of adult students have grown up with watching television as their dominant leisure activity. Lecturer E has found that this has given them generally high levels of visual literacy. Lecturers should utilise this strength in their students. She expects her students to develop electronic portfolios. In addition they should, in teams of 5, present posters (instead of the traditional British essay) to represent their ideas.

Lecturer E specialises in the Creative Arts. It is easy to see the relevance of visual literacy in her subject. However it is a challenge to lecturers in other more text-based subjects e.g. Adult Education to utilise this perceived strength of visual literacy in adult students of the twenty-first century.

6. A Futurist Mobile Phone Model of the Lecture

The most radical thinker on lecturing was Lecturer F at USQ. She argued that in 40 years time the face-to-face lecture will no longer exist. The only adult education available will be by distance education. This will be offered at a number of institutions around the world simultaneously 24 hours a day.

The main teaching tool will be the computer. This will resemble the current mobile phone. Teaching and learning will be a dialogue carried out by text. The cost of these computers will be comparable with that of throw away cameras today. USQ is a pioneer in this form of education. It uses a Cottage Industry model such as NextEd. There are learning management systems such as webCT and 24 hour technical support is offered.

Lecturer F also had radical views on how students acquired knowledge. This would be co-constructed by the lecturer/teacher and the students/learners. The teacher would normally have the responsibility for initiating, scaffolding and facilitating this co-construction. Instead of providing content (except to write bite-sized units of knowledge), the teacher would be presenting challenging ideas to their students and expecting them to be able to argue back at the same level.

Lecturer F admits that this is a high risk method of education. It has proved successful at Masters level. However it is doubtful whether traditional adult education students will be able to adjust to it in their first year of undergraduate study - at least in the foreseeable future.

How Lectures can be Supported for the Benefit of Adult Learners:

1. Innovations in lectures in Australia included:

  • A key pad system where students responded by answering questions on their pads as they come up on the main screen for the lecture theatre. This tends to be a form of multiple choice testing. However it keeps the students motivated and participating interactively in the lecture. It also provides formative feedback to the students and the lecturer as to whether they are under standing the lecture or not.
  • Video-conferencing in order to provide lectures to students at different campuses of the same university. Besides its main Toowoomba campus USQ also has a smaller campus at HerveyBay. Because of staffing difficulties students in some subjects receive the lectures by videoconferencing.
  • QUT is busy designing an experimental lecture theatre which will incorporate some of the latest technological developments. Elements of a theatre will be built into the design e.g. atmosphere, lighting effects and a stage. All students will have laptops. By such means the designers aim to make the new lecture theatre student-friendly.

2. Preparation for lectures included:

  • Students being given quizzes online 3 days before the lecture.

3. Follow-ups to lectures included:

  • Big lecture classes of 300 plus being divided into teams in which students attempt to solve problems together. The teams critique each other’s presentations and solutions.
  • Tutorials which needed to be carefully planned so that they are not merely recapitulating the lectures. Rather they should be utilising the experiential learning (Kolb, 1984) of the adult students.
  • Business students ran a simulated company online.
  • Law Cases are put up online.
  • Microteaching for student teachers. They taught a small class (5-12) of school children whilst the lesson was video-taped for later reflection. During this exercise they put into practice the teaching skills they had learnt from the lectures. Lecturer E called this the practice and feedback model.
  • Quizzes.
  • In Health-related subjects problem-based scenarios are put up online.

4. Problems with Lectures:

  • Students texting one another during the lectures.
  • Low attention span during 2 or 3 hour lectures.
  • Plagiarism in the written work produced.

5. Learning Support:

Some learning support was provided at QUT. 2nd and 3rd year students (peer assisted learning (PALS)) were paid a small amount to help 1st year students who were having difficulties adjusting to university study.

Deaf students received extra help at lectures at USQ. There are signers and note-takers.

Adult Students at Risk: a Focus on the Beginning of First Year

There is a strong support service for first year students at QUT. The first essay is regarded as a crucial first hurdle for adults taking Arts or Social Science subjects. Any student failing this essay was advised to seek advice from the appropriate student academic support service.

Diversity and Difference across Subjects

The perception of lectures by lecturers was investigated across a range of different subjects besides Adult Education.

At USQ a Lecturer in Information and Systems was interviewed. In this subject distance learners received a print-based version of the material in the post. This included a textbook and a book of extra reading. A Lecturer in Information and Systems was meant to be a model of the subject and needed to be very systematic in everything they do.

A lecturer in Organizational Behaviour and Management at USQ gave especial emphasis to external students. They outnumbered the internal students by a considerable ratio. In place of a lecture they received study notes. Alternatively they could receive the lecture by video-conferencing.

A 2 hour slot is common for lectures in Australia; whereas 1 hour is thankfully more common in Scotland. Thus there is more of a need in Australia to create a variety of formats to break up the 2 hours:

  • Workshops.
  • Small group discussions.
  • Videos.

Research in Scotland

Research had previously been conducted in Scotland by Sutherland and Badger (2004). They explored how lecturers perceive lectures. Lecturers from a sample of a wide range of subjects were interviewed. The teaching subject varied from Becher and Trowler’s (2001) “hard “ subjects such as physics to their “soft “ social science subjects such as education. The perception of the lectures of this sample of Scottish lecturers ranged from a conservative tradition of purely oral exposition to a radical tradition of high technology alternatives: videos of the world experts, Power Point summaries or the online input of the “lecture” material.

In some subjects which the students were unlikely to have studied at school e.g. Economics the lecturers’ main aim was to induct the first year students into the ways of thinking and conceptual frameworks of the subject. Some lecturers (e.g. Education, History and Religious Studies) aimed at teaching their students to think critically and not to accept information or assumptions without challenging them. In other subjects e.g. English and History motivation was the main aim. The lecturer tried to make the adult students enthusiastic about their subject. 80% of the lecturers referred to the provision of information as an aim. In Accountancy, Business and Biology it was the dominant aim. Over half the lecturers (e.g. Nursing, Maths, Economics and Accountancy) demonstrated some aspect of their subject to the students.

Previous Research in Australia

Isaacs (1994) conducted a study across a range of subjects at an Australian university. He found that amongst 100 lecturers the main aims of lectures were :

  1. to make students think critically about the subject.
  2. to demonstrate the way professionals reason in this subject.
  3. to make students more enthusiastic about the subject.
  4. to give students the most important factual information about the subject.
  5. to explain the most difficult points.
  6. to demonstrate how to solve problems.
  7. to provide a framework for the students’ private study.

To achieve these aims most lecturers wanted students to take notes: both as a structure and to facilitate further study. To aid this a high proportion of the lecturers distributed handouts before the lecture.

Questions Requiring Further Research

As Hartley (2003) reported few studies of how students actually use modern technology have yet been completed. Therefore a number of questions requiring further research remain:

  1. Is video-conferencing an effective form of lecturing for adult students? Do they learn as effectively from a video-conferenced lecture as from a face-to-face one?
  2. Which form of technology is more effective for Distance Education: old technology e.g. printed texts or new technology e.g. online teaching and learning? This could be measured by controlled experiment.
  3. Which is the best form of learning support for adult students to enable them to learn effectively from lectures:
  4. referring themselves to a study skills adviser?
  5. having a learning support teacher help them to take notes during lectures?
  6. being given a laptop so as to be able to spell-check and grammar-check their notes?
  7. Should the mobile phone replace the lecture as Lecturer F claims? How can it be made into an effective form of interactive texting for academic purposes?
  8. Should key pads be issued to all adult student attending lectures?
  9. Should lap top computers be issued to adult students to help them to take notes in the same way as secretaries do at meetings?

Implications of These Projects for Adult Education

There are exciting examples of innovation in Australia. The idea of key pads in lecture theatres for adult students seems very promising. This will give the lecture more possibilities to be interactive. Lectures need to be more interactive for adult students than for traditional age students. This would give them opportunities to contribute what Kolb (1984) called their experiential learning to the lecture and to query what they did not understand.

USQ caters mainly for Distance Education. Most of the students are over 21 years old. They are taught either by modern technology (i.e. they are taught online) or by old technology (i.e. print-based material is sent to them in the post).

Online teaching of mature students has been carried out for some years now at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. For example the University of Stirling’s has offered both a BA Adult Education (with some modules taught online) and an MSc Lifelong Learning (totally online). Whether it is realistic for more traditional adult education students to be taught online is questionable. However in the future such students may be more computer literate than they are now.

References

Becher, T. and Trowler, P. R. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territorities: intellectual inquiry and the cultures of disciplines Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bligh, D. (2002) (6th edition) What’s the Use of Lectures?Exeter, Intellect.

Brookfield, S. (1986) Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning, Open University Press, Milton Keynes.

Cornford, I.A. (2002) “Leaning-to-learn strategies as a basis for effective lifelong learning International Journal of Lifelong Education, 21, 4 pp.357-368.

Hartley, J. (2002) “Studying for the future” Journal of Further and Higher Education, 26, 3, pp. 207-227.

Isaacs, G. (1994) “Lecturing practices and note-taking purposes” Studies in Higher Education, 19 , 2, pp. 203-216.

Kolb, D. (1984) Experiential Learning, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Knowles, M. (1982) The Modern Practice of Adult Education : From Pedagogy to Andragogy (2nd ed.) Cambridge Books, New York.

Sutherland, P. and Badger, R. (2004) “Lecturers’ Perceptions of Lectures” Journal of Further and Higher Education, 28, 23, pp.277-289

Trigwell, K. and Prosser, M. (2004) “Developments and use of Approaches to Teaching Inventory”. Educational Psychology Review, 16, pp. 409-426.

Schedule for Interviewing Lecturers as to the Purpose of Lectures

1. What do you regard as the main function of lectures?

2. Are there any particular qualities which lectures in your subject should have, compared to other subjects?

3. What means of communication do you use?

(a) oral?

(b) visual?

4. Do you use Power Point presentations?

(a) If you do, what do you regard as its main merits?