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Recently the Australian higher education supplement published an article by Craig Deed about students walking out on lectures. In it he describes the sorry state of the university lecture, which are increasingly characterised by small attendances.

There are a number of perspectives on this observation, many of which essentially argue that students have changed, academics have not, and the problem is the manifestation of a growing generation gap. The solution: talk to ‘the kids’ in a language they understand – use technology. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? After all, they’re all members of the ‘netspeed’ generation, and ‘they’ all use computers for everything from listening to music to sex.

Those who know me know that I’m nothing if not a technophile, and I believe that technology can and should play an essential role in delivering good quality higher education. But I think when we look at lecture attendances it pays to look for a broader explanation, rather than going immediately for the technologically deterministic conclusion. There’s something going on here, for sure, but I’m wary of blaming students or expressing the change in terms of “gen-x”, “gen-y” “baby-boomer”, “netspeed”, etc. – labels which are meaningless weasel words when it comes down to it. For that matter, I’m also wary of blaming some homogenous concept of “academics” – academics span the generations and are a diverse group.

I believe poor lecture attendance is actually a symptom of structural change in higher education, as much as a change in students. In a way, poor lecture attendance and what we can do to fix it is less important than understanding why it has come about. We’ve seen the rise of a service industry mentality in Australian higher education over the past 20 years, since the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme by the Hawke/Keating government in the late 1980s. This development of a service industry mentality has accelerated in the last 10 years under the Howard government as university funding has become scarcer and universities have been forced to compete for students (which are a prime source of funding). The service mentality has an impact on lecturers, who find themselves under pressure to make their courses and units more engaging and exciting for their clients – students.

Consequently, it has been a long time since lecturers have had the luxury of locking themselves in ivory towers. Lecturers find themselves doing more and more marketing work, worrying about student satisfaction, and thinking about what they can do to keep the students – their clients – happy and engaged (even entertained). Furthermore, there’s a financial pressure on universities to accept greater numbers of students (and thus, downward pressure on student academic achievement) and on lecturers to pass students whose performance is borderline. I’m not suggesting for a moment that any Australian university would pressure academic staff to pass poor students – but the feeling of responsibility to pass paying students is palpable. Lecturers ask questions like “what would students like to learn?” rather than “what’s the best way to teach this to help students develop the knowledge I’m trying to teach?”.

Of course, students also respond to the model. University is something they are paying for – a degree and the associated benefits (which vary depending on the university and student) are the ‘deliverables’. They’ve been sold something and they’re paying for it. They have expectations that the universities themselves have nurtured. This brings me to the point of poor lecture attendance: under this model, it’s reasonable for a student of any age to ask how the thing they are doing is contributing to their goals. Unless there is a clear correlation between the lecture and practical outcomes in terms of the unit, the lecture is a low-value way of attaining the key unit outcome of a pass (or better). As one of my colleagues indicated in a blog item, the student walk-out on lectures is a rational and reasonable response if we assume that the purpose of higher education is primarily to achieve the instrumental goal of passing a unit and getting the degree. This is pointedly so if the student’s time is precious and he or she is forced to prioritise his or her time. To me, then, low lecture attendance is not about a generation of students who have low attention spans or who deal with computers better than face-to-face environments; it’s about the way we have manufactured an expectation in students through our own attempts to attract them at almost any cost. This has a lot more to do with socio-economics than technology.

So, what is to become of the venerable lecture? If we accept that the service model of higher education is here to stay for the present at least (and there’s no sign that a Labor government would change it), then perhaps we should just drop the lecture. But this raises an important question for me: what is the purpose of the lecture – why was it ever used as a means of teaching in higher education, and what do we lose if we jettison it? Alternatively, can we replace the lecture with something else that achieves the same pedagogical objectives but is presented in a way that more effectively addresses the utilitarian student?

I’d be happy to get some references about the history and pedagogy of the lecture as a form of education because my perspective here is based on little more than personal experience as both a student and a lecturer. From this admittedly limited perspective, the lecture does a few things. The most obvious is imparting a series of facts to students in a one-to-many non-interactive way. Sure, some people do conduct interactive lectures, but traditionally the lecture has been about a one-way dissemination of knowledge. The construction of lecture theatres across the world confirms this: rows of seats arrayed around a central podium, designed so that all attention is focused on the speaker. If you’ve ever tried to take questions from a lecture or tried to hear someone asking a question as part of the audience you’ll know how hostile the environment is to communicative exchange.

What is the value of such a one-way exchange? As a method of teaching it seems like it would be the least effective tool; more a blunt hammer than a finely tuned instrument. And in a time of media abundance and many-to-many mass communication it also seems ineffective and archaic. One value of the lecture, and one of the reasons it is still a preferred method of delivery, is efficiency: one person can disseminate information to many in one place at one time, ensuring that a single message gets out to a cohort in one consistent way. The alternative would be to conduct many lectures to smaller groups, risking multiple messages, and duplicating effort. Clearly this is a poor reason for keeping the lecture. There are much better ways of disseminating a single perspective to large groups of students, and different perspectives on problems are to be encouraged because they provide the basis for debate. In most universities a single video recording disseminated using a video or audio podcast would be just as good, if not better than the lecture (because at least students can view the lecture at a time of their chosing and rewind, pause and consume the information at the speed that best suits him or her).

There is another function of the lecture, beyond the mere dissemination of facts. In its best form, the lecture is a performance by the academic (ideally, an expert in the subject they are presenting), and a good performance does a lot more than encourage students to memorise the muscles of the back or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. A good lecture performance by a good speaker can inspire students and provide an enticing intellectual spark. People pay to go and see good lectures by key people, which suggests that in a least some circumstances, the lecture retains some of its value.

The lecture performance is also is also unique, or at least, it should be. It changes from year to year as the lecturer’s ideas about a subject changes and it changes from lecturer to lecturer. It is precisely this unique perspective provided by the lecturer that makes one university course different from another, and which makes a particular course valuable.

I’m not trying to present a formula for the ideal lecture as a way to get students to return to lectures. I think the current higher education landscape is hostile to the lecture, and I don’t think that even the best lectures will get high attendance from students unless there is a strong practical incentive (eg: this week Professor Davies be talking about how the Universe was created – but you should still come because he’ll also give you the answers to the end of semester exam).

So where does this leave us? A higher education system without lectures is lacking the performance value of the lecture – the nuanced presentation of the topic that I believe holds a great deal of value. Can’t this be presented in a video? Yes, but we still have the same issue – just because it’s a video doesn’t mean a student’s going to watch it – the utilitarian student still has no incentive to expend the time.

Solution 1: keep the lecture, but pepper it with utilitarian value

Solution 2: drop the lecture, but replace it with something that has the same performance benefits as the lecture and which also has utilitarian value

Solution 3: change the basis of the higher education system. It may take 20 years, which is why we need to start now.

Of course, much of this goes to the heart of the fundamental philosophy of higher education. I’d like to think that higher education is more than a transaction that catapults the graduate into a more commanding position in the job market. Higher education should be about developing critical thinking skills and opening rather than closing the student’s mind. Lectures – good lectures – have been an important part of this in the past because they allow the lecturer room to expand and present a personalised perspective on the subject they are presenting. This can’t help but be lost in a time when students are focused on passing the unit. If we choose to abandon the lecture then we need to be aware of what we’re losing in the process and it is crucial that we think hard about alternatives that put back in what we’ve lost with the lecture.

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