 If you come and give a keynote on the second or even worse the third day everybody's really whacked out, you know They've had enough of lectures. They've usually got their mobiles out and become completely contemptuous of the speakers So it's great to be here on the on the first day Because I'm in a rather awkward situation here because I'm going to really attack the lecture as a concept That's a sort of hopeless pedagogic technique, but I'm here giving one and And of course I'm well aware of the contradiction, but that's the way of the world unfortunately I'm going to give my talk a sort of narrative act. I have a sort of grudge to bear here I'm 54 years old and 30 years ago when I went to university for the first time I went to do a science degree and did physics, maths and chemistry in my first year and I was quite a bookish kid, you know I was mustered keen to go to university came from a sort of dark small Calvinist Scottish town It was my ticket to freedom Until I attended my first physics lecture Where a guy mumbled in without looking at the audience and stood for 50 minutes on three chalkboards from left to right drawing up maths mumbling barely comprehensible absolutely hopeless It was sort of devastating in a way because I didn't think that was what I was in for and I've been in physics lectures recently and believe me. They haven't changed one shot You know that I know that the students know that So much so I say I've come here with a grudge that actually changed at the end of my first year I said I've had enough of this and I changed to do philosophy Ended up with degree PhD in philosophy So on so forth anyway Forget that story, but I want to concentrate on physics today because it's absolutely fascinating subject I believe in the scientific method Strangely enough hardly anybody who teaches physics seems to believe in the application of the scientific method to teaching Harley anybody who teaches in a university believes in the application of the scientific method to teaching and learning Precious few know anything about it. You're still make the effort to read Or look at the research and this is a problem a big big problem for students and institutions as we know them Now I'll tell you a story to start with a little physics story when I must have keen student like me at 1780 went to University of Copenhagen and He had to sit his entrance exam and one of the questions in the physics paper was you're standing at top of a tall building with a barometer How do you determine the height of the building and this smart ass student actually gave the answer? I'm going to drop the barometer from the top of the building and time it and from that I know the constant gravity I'll work out the height of the building failed the exam He was a smart kid this and he did want to mean to the faculty so they interviewed him and given me a rural exam I said listen focus in the physics give us the correct answer the exam So he said well, I'm going to take the barometer and I'm going to use it like a ruler and I'm going to measure up the building and then his third answer was to use trigonometry and use the shadow of the building and take the The mercury from the barometer and use it as a sort of you know a surveying device Anyway, I've given an offering and accepted him in that guy turned out to be Niels Bohr And the the great thing about that story is physics is an absolutely wonderful subject It's actually quite easy to get quite far in physics and undergraduate level without knowing much about physics You really can just Jen up on examples and textbooks and know the formula and apply the maths and get past The truth of the matter is that most physics students are really still stuck in a sort of Aristotelian form of physics, you know, they still have that everyday view of physics Don't really get to the heart of the matter. It's an incredibly difficult subject to learn An incredibly difficult subject to teach So I'll focus in physics a little bit as I go through Anybody here heard of Maslow It's a damn shame that that stupid theory is still floating around and train the trainer courses Whatever courses you've a you know, the only there was no academic basis to Maslow's work whatsoever complete armchair theory And it's a completely impoverished view of human nature this little stupid pyramid It only survives because it's easy to put on a PowerPoint as a little colored triangle It's absolutely hopeless, but it's not unusual in the training and educational world to go in these really stupid courses I was a school government local sanctuary school and the inset days were full of the Mozart effect and NLP and left-right brain theory and learning styles absolute bogus nonsense If you go into the training world, it's even worse with Capatric gang of a 50-year-old theories nobody's bothered to update them nobody questions them and it's hanging around They're hanging around like fossil Back to Maslow however, he did say one very nice thing which I like which is if you go around often enough with a hammer Everything starts to look like a nail and this is what happens in academia when new teachers come in I hate the word lecturers a lecturer. Is that what you do you lecture people? We should abolish that job description The first thing they do though is simply look at what they're going to teach hardly any reflection on how they're going to teach Because they're simply going to teach the way they were taught which is through the lecture the lecture is the default Absolute default in teaching in universities Nobody questions it Now they're meant to be researchers you meant to be questioning critical thought as a whole point But nobody is questioning this fundamental truth now. I know I've many of you we think oh Donald you haven't been in a university recently It's all different What's the discussions in there? It's all very jazzy and so on bollocks It is not in and out universities all the time. I sit in lectures. I come to conferences. I see What's happening and that's not much change Now I'm not absolutely against lectures per se if they're good In fact, I'll say this is my favorite example of a lecture if you're going to give lectures Don't do it to five people or five hundred or five thousand go for ten thousand We're gonna stand and broadcast get some scale in here and the crazy English guy out in mainland China hires football stadiums 10,000 people a pop a big PA system twenty five Dollars per student they pay and that's a lot of money in China And he teaches them English they sing songs they chant it's motivational. It's a laugh It's good fun and they learn English. And I was if you're gonna do these damn lectures make sure they're bloody good And why not have them on scale? Rather than these rather odd places, you know, you're all sitting with laptops. Does this have power point that can you actually plug your laptop in this? I don't think you will hope this arrangement a Greek amphitheater basically Another thing that's interesting about lectures on the positive side just before I launch into my critique is that there is Good evidence that actually people have higher degrees of retention when they listen to an expert And I was if you have respect for the person in terms of their academic pedigree Haven't written a book or whatever then it does actually have a real effect on your psychological attention and therefore retention So it's not all bad that you should have very good people speaking perhaps in universities And many students will have gone to a good university because of the academics who are teaching on that course That's a tiny portion of students hardly any students actually check out the credentials of the academics and choosing a course Harley any I Suppose you could safely assume that if you go to Harvard or Oxford, you're gonna get that anyway and I recommend this book highly the media equation because that's got a very good study within it that shows that effect brilliant book Anyway, if you're interested in you learning Now let me start with a little bit of video here If you've seen this before I apologize, but I still you know, I've watched it dozens of times. I love it We have the volume, please of the anyone anyone a great depression past the anyone anyone a tariff bill the holly smooth tariff act which Anyone raised or lowered Raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government Did it work anyone anyone know the effects? It did not work and the United States sank deeper into the great depression Today we have a similar debate over this anyone know what this is class anyone Anyone anyone seen this before The Laffer curve anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as At this point, this is very controversial does anyone know what vice president Bush called this in 1980 anyone Something do economics voodoo economics Okay, now everybody's laughing their right right smiles at the very least because every single one of you been there You could not have gone through the schooling process or a degree or college without having been there dozens of times And if you don't it's a bit of a caricature, but if you don't imagine that this is happening to hundreds of thousands of kids here today Then you're kidding yourself This sort of pretence, you know that anyone anyone does anybody know the name of that movie by the way any Ferris Bueller and it's still an absolute classic, you know and kids love it It was absolutely hit the teenage market that freedom you feel I remember I said I was quite a bookish kid I can remember now the one day I skip school. I can remember the rush the thrill freedom of that. That's what the movie is about It's a caricature, but there is a sort of pretence that some lectures are interactive and indeed the guy Klaxon Has looked at this the people that anybody from the University of Bristol here They're I really I really love the the research is going on there because you know real hard-headed empirical stuff coming out About what teachers actually do in classrooms and there is an illusion that teachers ask kid questions and get critical thinking going But actually if you go and measure it critically Teachers ask pseudo rhetorical questions. Don't give the time the kids time to answer back cut in immediately And if you look at the number of questions kids actually ask of a teacher over a year It's a pitifully low amount about to a year Was a sort of pretence that critical thinking is being taught or that we're encouraging Learners to move forward Okay, I'll ask you a question and we know who these three fellas are from left to right. I'll give you a clue. That's the chronological order What was the order say? Almost right is Socrates plate on Aristotle fair enough quite they do look it's strangely similar up here and I want to go back really to get this arc in for a minute with regard to the Socratic method You hear people in education talking about the Socratic method actually, you know Socrates was never wrote a word It was all represented by in the dialogues of Plato However, there was another guy called Xenophon who looked at the Socratic method and it's not all it's cracked up to be Socrates was actually a bully He absolutely harranged the young students into coming around to his view of the world and It's not The method it's cracked up to be However, at least it was an attempt at being learner centric But if we move on to the next guy Plato We have Plato's Academy which was around until the 5th century AD hundreds and hundreds of years the sort of prototype of the University again no lectures in The Academy Plato who took his lead as a pupil of Socrates had that problem solving inquiring student-centered view of teaching and learning and Then if we skip over to Aristotle who was people who was a pupil of Plato's for 20 years Alexander the Great and so on and his institutional though it was around before he came along called the Lyceum again in Aristotle we have the first physicist the first natural scientist the guy who took Experience and inquiring of the national natural world quite seriously, but again the lecture was not the format in terms of teaching So where did this whole notion of a lecture or lecturing? come from Well in the Middle Ages The word lecture doesn't actually appear until about the 14th century and it literally means to read and I was reading a sacred text because of course To a degree Plato and Aristotle were at fault here Plato through Neoplatonism and Saint Augustine and Aristotle through through Aquinas we had people who were basically preaching and not teaching in other words It wasn't much use giving your students critical abilities because that wasn't the point You had a sacred text and that was it and I still to this day absolutely abhor the faith school system Having worked and traveled in the Middle East and seen the destructive effects of madrasas having seen Church schools indoctrinate their kids similarly in Judaism I think it's an appalling thing to do to a young person's mind to close them down in those formative years and yet that seems for some reason I think it's to do with Blair to have resurfaced in education You'll all have seen this slide. No doubt. It's like doing the rounds and everybody's slide pack and this was around 1340 University of Bologna. It's actually not a painting at all It was a little sort of 10 by 22 centimeter picture in a manuscript before printing of course, but it's interesting in that the guys of course You've seen this at a previous alt talk which is where I found it in the first place The guys are sleeping the guys are not looking at the lecturer at all The guy more importantly is reading from a book and they have books in front of them the pre-book era Now the word lecture about this time just meant reading. That's all it meant about the 16th century It changed its meaning and it became a word that was associated with instruction And then if we jump now to the 21st century Actually, the word has a rather odd meaning if somebody says don't lecture me Actually, there's a very strong pejorative word. I don't want to be lectured to say my kids to me 216 year olds It's a rather odd term because it still has that didactic forceful imposing your view of the world on another person Okay, let's trip back to the physics for a moment Who's this? Nope Newton as a Newton one of the greatest English minds ever and Newton at Cambridge was obviously a brilliant physicist and absolutely revolutionized physics But his lectures were interesting he used to trip along the lectures and nobody would turn up He actually was seriously autistic possibly asked for this hopeless lectures hopelessly mud and muddled Absolutely boring as hell and nobody would turn up. That's not unusual the two vice-chancellors. I know I live in Brighton University Sussex University Brighton says it's a great dark secret But almost every university has lectures who turn up and those students turn up two of them Surprising but true The difference with Newton is he delivered these lectures anyway How bizarre is that? He stood there Talk about a lack of social skills And then there's a very great a great anecdote I read with Tilda Swindon the actress Who was at Oxford and she went along to a lecture by Raymond Williams and Raymond Williams came and she was the only person They're sitting right in the front and Raymond walked in didn't even look at her went up the lecture read his lecture and walked back out of the end again That's now How bizarre is that behavior? But you know as well as me that there are those weird defaults those weird behavioral traits in the world This is Richard Feynman jumped to the 60s a very flamboyant physicist noble laureate Fantastic guy really highly recommend these books and is credited with having written the finest lectures on physics ever written and delivered He was a brilliant teacher Highly recommend his biography as well as the lectures if you're interested in physics. However This is the biography He took time out and went to teach students in Brazil and found very quickly that those kids were learning by the book and that was they could pass the physics exam But they knew precious little about real physics whenever you really pulled They didn't have any of the tools and instruments to really go on and solve real problems in physics They could only answer exam questions this puzzled them And he went on this huge crusade to rewrite science books, which he thought were awful he's probably right even to this day and Published these essays however in the preface to the essays he admits This is the best at lectures the best lecturer probably ever in physics That it was a hopeless task That teaching physics through lectures was next to useless the preface is absolutely fascinating a guy who completely Rejected what he had been doing for nearly 20 years Let's jump on now. This guy is a guy. I think said for this Seb Schmoller. This is Eric Mazzur who has been teaching at Harvard physics at Harvard since 1984 alongside quite a number of Nobel Prize winners Again when he joined and he was given the physics course to teach He didn't realize at the time he was really excited as a new, you know fresh recruit to Harvard He didn't realize that all the other people who taught physics absolutely hated undergraduates and wanted nothing to do with this course Which is not an unusual stance in academia This disrespect for undergraduate courses, so he had a crusade. He said listen I'm a data driven guy. He noticed when he went to dinner with some of these guys These are Nobel Prize winning physicists that when they discussed education all they did was revert back not to the scientific method or data or research What they defaulted back to was anecdote That's all they had in the back pocket when they described teaching just some stories and Of course eventually and this is the telling point and I've been here myself with friends of mine who are academic it always ends on blaming the students It's always the students who are at fault the new intake the internet ruining our minds so and so forth so he set out to look at the data and Ended up writing this book called peer instruction, which is absolutely fantastic And I like this line because it sort of sums up what bad lectures are all about The lectures the transfer of notes of the lecture to the notebook of the student without passing through either How true that is even today when you go to conferences and it tends to be more academic speakers They sometimes literally take out a sheet of paper and they read it I'm always absolutely astonished that any adult would subject me as another adult to that experience Why on earth do I want to sit and listen to somebody read anything? It makes no sense, but again, it's happening in conferences all across the globe today What he did was he looked at I think all the FCI test and it tests physics students on the real understanding of Newton's three laws Okay, pre-test and post-test and he got a big shock remember these are students at Harvard straight-A students He found that they were disastrous. They were Aristotelian Physicists they hadn't even grasped the basic Newtonian laws in his course and a typical question was How does the force exerted by a heavy truck compared to the force exerted by a small car when the two hit head on? Okay, bigger same smaller not exetting any force that just in each other's way nice colloquial English question about Physics really testing whether you know anything about Newton at all How many would say a one Couple how many would say B? small again C smaller none and B Right great the majority can be refused point blank pants of the question That's great. The correct answer is actually B Strangely enough lots of students do answer a and it's you know Don't be ashamed if you answer today because that's a sort Aristotelian view of the world They sort of associate damage and inertia with with the Newton's law, which is every force has an equal and opposite reaction So B is actually the right answer there But it gave them this test and was quite shocked by the results Because he found that students well into the course were weren't doing too well So he rewrote the rulebook and said I'm not going to lecture on the same way again. I'm going to do something radically different I'm going to go back to Socrates and I'm going to lead by probing or creative questions And he started giving his students questions to cut a long story short the students themselves He certainly saw a noticeable increase in their grades and performance in the undisputed in understanding of the physics as well What he also did was look at this this issue When you have a whole load of people in a room and you're teaching physics Do you give them notes to pre-read before the class? Do you hand out the notes at the beginning of the lecture? Do you tell them not to read the notes till the end which I've heard often enough have you even heard don't take notes It's all in the handout or Are the notes handed out the end any do go experiment with this and found out that number one was by far Just give the students the stuff guys, you know, they're not there to listen to you perform. They want to learn physics And indeed anybody who says don't take notes is committing an absolute pedagogic criminal act Because the studies show that actually 20 up to 30 percent increases in retention If you take things if you write notes in your own words not verbatim notes, which is what students tend to do for the first few weeks Before they stop attending lectures altogether so interesting guy He also looked at the seating and found that when you sit the poorer students at the front and Curiously the smart students at the four corners This is because he goes into an interactive session and he's questioning technique You get an overall rise in performance the good students don't suffer the poor students get brought up to To the right level and of course he he leads his lectures by questions thought-promoting questions And he has every student as a clicker and let me explain how he does this He poses the question He then gets all the students to say nothing just answer it comes up on histograms on the slide behind them If the majority get that correct Short discussion move on to the next topic students have grasped it and these are clever questions If it isn't he gets them together in small groups and has peer interaction and he really does believe that physics Especially Nobel laureates and physics professors at Harvard Harvard really almost cannot teach physics They are so good at physics. They cannot bring themselves cognitively down to the level of the learner And he feels very strongly that students give mutual support in a very positive way and has the empirical data to prove it So when the majority are incorrect it goes into discussions and far more detail and it seems to work Let me jump to another institution. Is anybody here from the Institute of physics in theoretical physics in Trieste? No, okay. That was a long shot. I Was there last year absolutely fascinating as an institution who does nothing but teach theoretical physics and True to form guys just like this walk in with three chalkboards That's what they do now the guy Marco. They recognize one thing. I said, listen, I'm gonna change these guys. They're introverts They're not gonna turn around to the audience. They're not gonna be You know live wires in terms of talking and lecturing. I have to do it another way So what they did and I know that many of you have been involved in this I mean, I think it's absolutely morally bankrupt that people don't record lectures. I think it's just unbelievable I mean, I know there are patients on but not giving a student the second bite of the cherry That theory of learning come from I'm just gonna give you at once guys. You better listen. That's it Imagine being a journalist or not. I'm a novelist. I read my novel out once. I'm not gonna publish it You better listen How stupid is that? Especially in learning because we know that hardly anybody learns anything on one hit You're gonna forget almost everything. I tell you today before you've hit the car in the car park It's done at 50% after a few days way way down to 10-14 percent That's a fact Ebbinghaus 1885 120 years of research shows it Coming back to the Institute what they did was they simply had a stills camera that took 15 seconds images and the audio The physics lecture, but what was interesting was the way the students responded These are students from all over the world who come to this institute speaking different languages And they had a real problem with these physics guys who were struggling with English The students were watching on average 13 hours a week of recorded lectures two hours a night on average The results from the students on a trend analysis after implementing the system was absolute dog leg And I was it encourages the students to be more inquiring because they can stop We don't do all the things you know you can do with the recording stuff But more importantly they were learning far more than they were before and If you're interested and give you the papers, you know the empirical studies showing the impact that it had in this institution Which was profound? They they had a you know a cohort of lecturers who started this it's now Culturally become the norm so that you'd be pretty hard push to go and try and teach there without adopting this system You'd be regarded as the outsider So once you get the ball rolling and you see the results, it starts to work And then of course this is almost become another cliche in terms of slides professor Lou and MIT in his physics lectures I'm actually not a I'm actually not a great fan. You know, I'm going for a very strong thesis here I don't like lectures full stop. I don't have a shift. They're recorded You know, I have piled through YouTube edu and iTunes you I have watched dozens of these lectures and they are mostly shit That's the truth of the matter the psychology of lectures from Bartley dump them It actually had old discredited theory and it was absolutely appalling some of the stuff that's been shoved up there What's the point of just recording lectures that were bad in the first place? It makes no sense We have to have a more sophisticated view of this pedagogic problem. Surely they're just saying Let's just shove them down a tape. I think that's good though. If you're gonna have them do that But it's not the solution to the problem However, I think Lou's quote is right here It's better to see a first-class lecture on video than a mediocre one in the flesh Why on earth should I've got twin boys at 16? They're just going into sixth form college One is a mass physics kid. Why on earth should he be taught by a third rate Physicist in some local institution when I've got people like professor Lou and Mazua online Why on earth would he want to do that? It makes no sense whatsoever apart from this tradition. Everybody's a teacher even though all they want to do is research And this is the result boredom people cutting out of lectures so right I like the story, but so he was a mathematical geneticist in the States and he used to bring his guinea pigs along and and And explain his experiments and he used to tuck the guinea pig under one arm And he'd be chalking away and at the end of one lecture he actually took it out and used it as a chalk duster Talk about sort of mad professor, you know, that's what these guys are like You must remember that in physics, especially the people are largely introvert Highly analytic bright people with low social skills Why are you shoving them in front audiences and trying to get them to lecture and teach and inspire? It doesn't work and that's true for lots of subjects and Indeed in this five-year study on five Russell group universities You find that on first year undergraduate students They come in with pretty full attendance at lectures and then it drops down dramatically to a mean of just over 50% and stays there And in other words if this were a factory producing, I don't know You know table lamps and you were scrapping 50% of them every day. You'd be pretty worried Nobody really worries about people not attending lectures in the system quite awkwardly. Is it that bad? Why do students not attend because the board shitless we know that Are we doing anything about it? Not really Is there something suspect here the lecture itself damn right there is An interesting book if you want to start other loads of stuff on this But by and large the research points in a very clear direction, which is in terms of psychological attention It's really difficult to hold your attention as a learner in a deep subject like physics for more than 10 minutes 25 minutes tops you're losing them because they want to stop reflect apply their knowledge and The lecture is just not the most appropriate method for promoting student thought it has no critical Collaborative component to it whatsoever. So if you want an initial test that's wrong Let me Go into another tack entirely and I'm gonna go into the psychology of a learning for a minute because this is where the real battle is if you Really do believe in the scientific method and think we should have an evidence-based approach to teaching then what does the psychology of learning? say about lectures Actually in 2000 years, I haven't found one single sentence that supports them a lot of people put their minds to this problem Nobody's saying the lecture is the way to do this It's a default. It's a fossil. It's a medieval relic For a start. Why have one hour? We only have one out lecturers and universities colleges are largely one hour That's for the benefit of the timetabling It's only because the Babylonians had a base 60 number system that we have hours in the first place They've got absolutely nothing to do with the psychology of learning and As we know if we watch YouTube or Ted or people who really know what they're doing the hour is a hopeless time It's just like television, you know people in the BBC produce programs They're half an hour an hour because they have to be timetabled for the radio times for God's sake We have the web. It should be as long as it needs to be guys And that's about 10 or 15 minutes or sometimes in YouTube two minutes. It depends on the task It's certainly not this default hour and how many times have you been lecturers or even toxic conferences where you know That the whole thing has been padded out to fit the time it happens all the time Usually really shit teachers put the history of the topic at the beginning or the learning objectives Really bad teachers always put the objectives of the course up front and bore people shitless before they've even started You know imagine going to the cinema and getting a pricey of the plot before you watch the movie. How stupid? Blame Ganyu for that. He put that in his nine steps of stupid instruction Of course, we have Ted and other things I'm a sort of fan of Ted, you know quite like but at least they made some effort on production values They keep it short. It's as long as it should be good combination of visuals. Sometimes they just let the person speak it depends They play to you The second one is this tyranny of time. Why should I turn up anywhere at a specific time to learn anything? You know I'm 54 years old. I ain't going back to university I'm not going to turn up for a specific place in a specific time Just because some academic has scheduled the course. I want it in my time and we do have media sharing It does exist out there. We do have time shift. We do use BBC I and all those other things So let's think about time shifting and not time tabling, which is what universities tend to do And then we've got YouTube edu All that jazz loon up there. Look at the number of hips here. Just shy of half a million Now a normal physics lecture, even if they have a hundred students in a class and do it two or three times a week Takes about twenty years to get anywhere near a hundred thousand. The scalability of this is absolutely phenomenal Now let's just say that the argument is well videos are slightly impoverished medium You don't get as much as the live impact and so on. It doesn't matter. You got half a million guys who have seen your lecture You know do the sums here It makes no sense not to record them and not to use the good stuff Just like movies just like books. I mean, we don't get every lecture to write their own textbook So why do we insist that everybody has to be a teacher even when they're not suited to teaching? iTunes you MIT coursework all the physics stuff here. Absolutely fantastic Interestingly the top. Do you know what the top courses in iTunes you? six in the ancient world Worrying University Students really look at you know when you give them pre-choice and what sort of lectures they want to walk at chat interestingly, however Luins physics lectures also appear in the top 10 of all those media on YouTube You know he knows there's some serious people studying serious stuff using this and when you look at the demographics of this There are kids in the third world and China and Africa really really benefiting from this in a way That was unimaginable just a few years ago Someone is this tyranny of location you know the fact that you have to be here You know, you know in this room. There's a Greek amphitheater. You can't plug your laptop in It's taking a lot of money to get here. You're staying in some hotel or whatever There's something quite odd about this having to be somewhere Unless it's a good event where you're doing lots of networking and I know you will be having looked at the program so Come around here now psychological attention. This is the big one really you know And don't tell me you haven't been like this at a conference. I haven't I haven't I'm 50 54 December I have never been a conference where in the second day. I haven't been bored shitless What almost pains in my chest the board honestly, I get talks with companies all the time. I'm always bored. I Don't know how people get away with it. I Don't know why people pay for it half the time But there seems to be a certain acceptance that you can bore and you can be bored Cognitive overload. This is cognitive overload is an interesting one and new teachers Especially in schools suffer from this really badly in our words You underestimate how difficult it is to learn and you really hammer the students with too much stuff too quickly and That by and large is what the lecture encourages you to do it encourages padding out It encourages too much stuff too quickly and cognitive overload is the absolute disease for learners It's everywhere almost all teachers suffer from this Even good ones it takes years and years and years to draw yourself back to simplify to cut it down Pair back and to teach effectively And then you know that video I showed you at the beginning imagine if I stood up here and just read that from a piece of text that script It would have been crap. You know that nearly the same effect and Hardly anybody in the education and training system has even looked at the structure of memory on a on a on a very schematic level They'd be hard-pressed to make a distinction between some and taken episodic memory might know about Short-term working memory and long-term memory. They would know very little actually about the real techniques Which effect or shunt stuff from working to long-term memory? But the big one here is episodic and semantic and by and large lectures are episodic Experiences and I was you know you they're giving you this alive video view of a live person But they're shoving semantic information at you and The mind doesn't cope with that very well So you have this huge confusion over media mix and when people do use PowerPoint They have hardly any knowledge about the appropriate use of text images animation video and audio hardly anybody knows how to use these things properly because it takes time to learn and Then learn by doing even in physics good physicists learn loads in the lab And they learn loads by applying their knowledge to real problems and the lecture room just cuts that out It's absolutely hopeless and we've had you know plenty of 150 years of theory here from William James Duee cobe shank lots of really good theory and they're showing that it's an absolutely necessary condition for learning even a subject like physics And yet we abandon it Except in medicine clinical practice I think you know they've always been quite good in this and and in the sciences to a degree and In another big one spaced practice. I've already mentioned debbing house There's 120 years ago the guy came up With the basic statement which has remained eternally true, which is you don't learn a damn thing without repeated practice over time you just don't And therefore this one-off lecture this one-off episodic thing is still the norm it doesn't make any sense and I like this example because it again relates it back to to to science and the school teacher up in the T side who actually Decided to take space practice and apply it to these kids and got the same results after 90 minutes of teaching with his cohort of science Teachers using spaced practice then he had with a class who had been doing it for several years. It really does work Not collaborative. That's obvious. How many of you have at you know when you come into English? It's a very British thing this it's less so in the States you come in at a conference hall And maybe there were half the number here everybody sits with us with a sort of chair between them You can see it here, you know people spread out and I was they absolutely hate talking to anybody next to them I've lived in England for 26 years, and I still cannot get over the fact that people never speak to me in the train In fact when I speak to them my accent, of course, they think I'm crazy, you know, but the You know, this is not the environment to encourage collaboration. It just isn't it does the very opposite it isolates people isolate And then I've mentioned this already this whole notion of personality problems You know the people who are primarily recruited to be researchers regard teaching as an adjunct or a sideline This is wrong and until we reset the system so that we don't assume that every teacher has to be a researcher Which is how it used to be. I love the 92 reforms in the higher education sector, but it had a very destructive effect I think in producing lots of second and third rate research But more importantly getting lots of people who are inappropriate researchers to teach at the same time We have to recognize that this is a truth and therefore cut back on the whole lecture thing now What happens when people academics go into second life and decide to play around with this medium? Hey presto, they build a bloody lecture theater It's crap enough in the real world without mimicking it in in the virtual world And have you ever been along ten of these like maybe they are absolute who there's usually There's usually the guy and he's couple of his mates and and then within five minutes Somebody pops in and offers you sex. That's that's what happens in second life It's absolutely hopeless. Why did why do people do this? Don't you recognize the stupidity in the model in the real world before tackling it in the other world? And let me end on a serious note here because this is really a fundamental piece of research I go back to time and time again by Carol twig big bit research 8.8 million 30 community colleges in the UK Using technology to affect learning getting away from the old lecture model. Is it cost effective? Yes Are we seeing better learning? Yes can drop out rates be reduced? Yes But what was more interesting was the recommendations in the research for regard to how you should proceed Which is what most of you guys do for a living and the important thing I think was number three, which is don't fiddle about with courses just redesign them take the course Reconstruct it don't assume that the lecture is a necessary condition for success It may be culturally, but it's unlikely to be pedagogically and don't bolt on the new technologies You know, that's that's what we do by recording lectures Why don't we look at the very nature of a lecture rethink that one rather than just recording them cultural problems, of course? But I think I'd like to end on that note because You guys are in the middle of these wars these battles were regard to implementing technology and you will be hitting Barriers left right and center. So I'll end on that note and good luck to y'all. I'm happy to take any questions Yeah, thank you very much just hang around for some questions We're due to kind of end at around 20 past. We've got shuffle time. So we all have to shuffle it shuffle time Until then we got a chance. We wanted to give good good amount of time for people to ask questions I see we've got hands up already We also may have one or two questions coming through on illuminate So they're coming potentially from different places, but we're focused on the whole at the moment first hand up there from someone in blue Hi, Donald Lindsey Jordan from University of the Arts London. I think you had a really tough job there Donald Um, you know knocking the lecture in a lecture. So how else would you have? You know, how else would you have to use your word delivered that? Well, I could question the Most of my activity is not doing this most of the things I do in life in terms of effect You know having built a company and I try to affect change for you learning currently has been is online and I blog a lot. I'm on Facebook a lot. I Twitter a lot Most of the activity if you look at people who blog a lot and have been doing it for many years and build an audience You get audiences that are ten times bigger than any one audience. You're gonna get a keynote at a conference So you go for scalability and I would say I have said absolutely nothing today that isn't on my blog Absolutely nothing and I would say that would be my you know my first port of call and when I'm looking for interesting information I've never been an old conference before I'm not a member of all but I've looked at loads of all talks And I found some of them, you know pretty inspiring that I do it online I'm not gonna come up to nottingham from Brighton Necessarily when I know I can see it online. I just don't see the point in this. I just don't get it You know, don't you watch Ted? You're unlikely to be three grand to go and see Ted, but surely you watch it online. That's a much preferable It's been three grand going there, but I watched those videos endlessly in other words I think we should all be focusing our attention on a different mix, which is more online than offline Conferences are a bit hard I mean, I certainly have a question In the interim, I mean it's it's around that kind of you know observation around people that teachers skills teachers rather than lecturers skills and You know, no nobody really knows, you know, how what how how to use, you know, the right kind of pedagogical combination of text, you know Images so forth around the kind of issue of semantic memory I mean, how are we gonna get over that one? Well, first of all, I think you should give up on trying because I Mean, I ran a company for many many years I wouldn't dream of taking people in the IT department and turning them into sales people I wouldn't in a million years dream of doing that because their personalities would be able to do it They wouldn't want to do it and and every academic institution in Britain You have the same problem you have people who want to do research and do not want to teach and do it reluctantly and badly So the solution to the problem is not to force them Round pegs and square holes is to accept that there's another solution to this problem Which is not getting those people to teach and making a distinction between teaching research Until we do that. We are forcing round pegs and square holes and there will be crap teaching It's a consequence of that and so I you know, I Don't think it's a training problem My interest on all these to follow on from Vanessa's question what you cover in terms of The presentation to us today and other presentations. I've seen you deliver is What happens between? The person who's contracted to be a lecturer and a group of people who've signed up to be their students You don't seem to cover the policy and strategy issues and the implications for what you're saying for for the institutions I'll leave it at that. Well, yeah, that's right And then I don't come along and talk about that I have been heavily involved in that and I've worked with people like Alan Langlands as the chief executive hefty And I've known Alan for years as a Scott skype as vice chancellor Dundee University. I've worked him on major projects trying to get Medical schools worldwide to come together to share basic undergraduate content, which hardly any of them do stupidly So medical schools typically even have graphics departments. They're still drawing the human body Stupidly hundred grand to pop these departments cost I've worked with that I've worked with David Willis recently on on real policy I mean, I think we're facing some really big problems I remember the Labor Party by the way, but they are absolutely hopeless on this the the interesting thing that will face us in the very near future and I mean October is the Absolute need to teach more students with less money and less resources and until we grasp some of these problems We won't get anywhere. Now. I think I'm a great admirer of the open University in Martin Bean We've had it since 1969 and we haven't actually Managed to exploit it in the way we should not only within that institution but in other institutions But people like David Willis will do this You will be able to study at a distance to a degree you never did before I think there are some enlightened people around who will push the system in that direction in other words There are real policy things But you've got to get you've got to get involved in politics at the higher level to do that Which I've been involved in politics all my life and that's a different scale of things And it's quite difficult to come and launch out of conferences on that to be honest and and save what's in pipelines and planning You said Donald that forcing researchers to teach is forcing like a square peg into a round hole Yeah, well, you know, but Likewise, if you're a fantastic teacher, you can inspire learning in a whole range of individuals You're never going to get a job in a university unless you've got a research track record So isn't it time to change the you know, what are we trying to do in universities? Is it research or is it teaching? But are they two very different things? That's another question Well, they are and of course what you said there was true of the UK system, but it's not true in the US you know, there are teaching universities and I did I went to I went to an Ivy League University And it was an absolute revelation for me 20 to go to a place where at the end of the end of the first semester I got a form asking my opinion as a student of the teacher. I have never ever experienced that in a British University I'm sure I understand that it's changed somewhat now but I Think you've hit the nail in the head here if we continue with this catch 22 We have a massively inefficient system. There is no human endeavor more efficient inefficient I think than education and training It's absolutely hopelessly mild in old theory and practice and these political catch 22 You're absolutely right in what you say, but the point is politically to change that and there are people who believe it must be changed I Think this is going to happen quite quickly myself having some knowledge of the political environment This distinction between teaching institutions and teaching and research institutions huge pressure on the system to change Okay, one in the middle just towards back. Yeah, thanks Diane Brewster X University of Sussex and currently up in university And I agree with with a lot of what you said But I think one of the problems and I've experienced is is an estates problem a physical building problem We're still building lecture theaters and seminar rooms You know, I know a lot of tutors who want to move away from the lecture paradigm They might occasionally want to give a lecture as a kind of inspirational thing to do to get students engaged But they want to do more kind of workshop based Activities and we still have some in our rooms with notices saying do not rearrange the furniture in this room We've got lecture theaters with bolted down seats that you can't do group work in a space like this You can talk to the person next to you, you know risk a crook neck and turn around to the person behind you But there is a whole issue. I think about estates and about the model of teaching and learning in universities Which needs to go beyond us and and beyond the lecturers to management and and estates Brilliant question great dark secret of the higher education system I came in a taxi to this building and I counted five builder vans Five never saw a single student and four gardeners and what seems to be the campus of a small country size of a small country There is a huge problem here speak to Alan Langlis in this in the last round of cuts in universities Most of the cuts came on capital expenditure Because he knows and has believed for years that people spend far too much money on building monumental buildings And there are far too many vice and pro-chancellors chasing CBEs and monument building and it's an absolute disgrace Building more rooms like this and forgetting how learning is really tackled But of course we saw that last round of cuts a massive cut not in teaching and research Most of the cut was actually in capital expenditure, and that's absolutely right You know I get the sense that no I was coming in the tax year I get the sense that nothing the great danger with northern powers will become a university and students Well people teaching people nobody else doing anything else these institutions are getting enormous In terms of the capital estate and they are incredibly badly managed if you look at the data on occupancy in university buildings. It's unbelievable and criminally low Way below 50% any other area of human endeavor you'd be sacked in the spot for not using buildings properly But most of them are empty most of the time I went to the University of Ulster recently and to give a talk and I went into a building which was four stories high in Derry at fully lit on every floor, and there wasn't a single person in the building It was completely not only empty it took me ages to find a human being on the campus to get to this lecture And that's criminal and stupid and I blame the management of universities again This is a very unpopular thing people say that managerialism was correct in the university might ask These are mostly academics and ex academics badly managing estates. They don't know how to manage buildings They're falling down. They don't know how to put money aside for maintenance. It's a mess I'm sorry. I get really angry in that. Yeah, I've got kids. I don't want this happening You know I always spend money in more buildings like this Can he sense? We've actually got one come through on Twitter. That's an interesting which is could Donald summarize what he recommends as alternatives to the lecture Well, we have we already have Institutions that have been remember it was 50 years ago now that the University was set up You know 200,000 students the biggest university in the UK nobody's on the campus It's you know 10 20 times the size of another unit in the other university in the UK. We've had this model for 50 years And if you go across to the states and the University Phoenix There are lots of examples where we've managed to dispense with the lecture as the basic pedagogic technique People still get their degrees and if you look at the data from students in the OU they absolutely love it They score immensely well on student satisfaction It's not as if I have to come up with any models here. They're staring everyone in the face The problem is that the institutions are hermetically sealed with their own budget and funding mechanisms that make them fight each other rather than share You know the playing fields the sports fields here were unbelievable not one single sportsman on them But I bet there are poor kids on the outskirts and nottingham We were really struggling to find a football field that's criminal and stupid We should be sharing those common facilities rather than hermetically sealing them up in Institutions and letting academics manage them. It's not what they like doing. They don't like doing it and they can't do it well Yeah, we've got more we've got two we've got one sort of at the back in the middle and the one just on this edge I'm getting gradually angrier I think we can probably take these two and then one right at the back and then we'll Hi, I think it's a bit A bit dangerous isn't it to polarize things is either teaching or research Because there's lots of people that are sitting in the middle that you know the research in forms of teaching vice versa So there are quite a few people who are quite good teachers who are also researchers I think it's a bit, you know, it's a bit in the current climate a bit dangerous to say it's gonna either kind of your research or teaching I Don't think there's any climate where you don't see what you think is a university It was supposed to be open to critical thinking a new idea surely But I think if you look at the distribution curve on this it's a good question I would agree with that. I think in some subjects actually specifically in the arts and so on actually Practitioners and researchers actually probably do make good teachers But in physics where it's a non-volatile subject difficult to learn difficult to teach There's no reason whatsoever that researchers should be teaching because they're bad at it And I was you know We have to look at the subject by subject look at the distribution curve and take a reasonable view in it I mean, I'm not going to be completely one way or the other in this I think there are some researchers who will be good teachers some teachers who good researchers But the two are completely different skill sets And there's no other area human endeavor where we collude the two Coalesce them and get such a messy outcome, but I would agree with you I think there are lots of good researchers that are good teachers fine. Let them teach But we have to have some way of determining their competence I mean it is almost impossible to get sacked from a university for bad teaching. It is literally impossible That will change in October because the pressures will be enormous and my local University Sussex I've just gone through a process of hiring lots of people and it's called cuts And it is a cut and they've got rid of about hundred people own voluntary redundancy bases But that's what you have to do You have to weed and you have to feed if you're going to have a vibrant teaching community and a vibrant research community You just can't have people hanging on forever Okay, we had one just out on this edge here Yes, thank you. No, I'll watch University College Dublin And I've been both a student in a campus-based university and with the open University and I've also taught online and Studied online and I do think one thing that's a little bit missing from that's also feature of the conference here today Is this kind of the social element social? You know you have social networking and discussion forum and so on online It is the chance to interact with your peers and with the lecturers But you do get around the lecture maybe not in the lecture itself and also at a conference That's still a little bit missing in the online world. I would agree with that I mean and of course that's not an attack you get rid of lecturers and still have that's nothing to do with whether lectures are pedagogically good or bad thing and Indeed my recommendation is that if you have a much more learner-centric view of the world and that blended learning and I mean Blended learning and not blended teaching whether you just dice up different teaching techniques When you bring this in you really do have a massive increase in the level of social learning where the face-to-face are online But the days the current university system is really based on the 18 year old undergraduate intake model Despite the fact the majority students are a lot older than that And it still is the rather old-fashioned and quaint idea that you can have a drunken meander for three or four years And still get a degree and not go to lectures those days are gone It was a privilege For a chosen few it's no longer something that we can afford and I don't think it's something that's desirable either I don't you know, I don't I don't say I buy that over romanticized view of getting a whole load of rich kids together and allowing them three years to Go through that experience. I don't really buy that much But you're right. I'm all in favor of the social stuff. I just think there's not one iota of social learning in a lecture room And then final question at the back Hi, Donald it's cell cook from gist tech this and I just wanted to bring in the notion that you're talking about online And I too have had lots of conversations Alan as well What we're doing about a 10 million who are not online at the moment who may well be charging towards this idea of HE in inverted commas Have you got any thoughts about that you'd like to share with us around that whole notion of the FE paradigm the schools things the Notion of how we're gonna blend some of the fantastic Activities that go on in those sectors and picking the best out of some of those other areas and blending it with what goes on in the innovative parts of Universities and trying looking at some of those things. I just wonder if you've got anything you'd like to share on that So yeah, I'm gonna be a contrarian against here in this one because you know, I don't buy this glass half full thing It's a tiny number of people are not online and if you want to be online in institutions It's easy because every school has broadband every institution has it in fact My experience as a school governor was salutary here the inclusion agenda Was actually counterproductive every time we came up and I found money for this school kit for this school Rejected every time on the basis that a couple of kids didn't have broadband at school And I was the inclusion agenda ended up being exclusive They wouldn't do a damn thing until everybody had something now. I don't remember this argument being applied to books. I Mean I went I didn't have any books in my house when I went to school But I can't remember teacher saying well, we can't teach using books guys because Donald doesn't have any books at home It's stupid argument in other words the inclusion people have suddenly become a sort of the fascist of the world Well, you can't actually do anything until everybody's got it. It makes no sense No medium works like this, you know, and if that's the solution we have Martha Lane Fox Martha Lane Fox and inclusion everybody should have a pony or something. I don't know where did that one come from? You know, what world are we living in when she gets chosen as a zapper inclusion? She would be in a sink of state you'd last five minutes But I think that the point here is that in my experience in a school We're a sat for four years desperately trying to get things done was that the debate was counterproductive You know the inclusion debate was the enemy of progress. It was very curious But you go with the flow in this and there are easy ways of dealing with those small number of kids Who don't have access it was a really easy thing in terms of homework and print outs and so on to cope with that problem The truth is that schools don't actually want to communicate with parents And therefore they don't want to open it They don't want to open these systems up and that's that was the real political battles with the teachers Interestingly, I don't believe in this digital divide thing at all. I think it's always been a series of fractures It's not been a rich and poor issue necessarily and in the schools have been in very often the teachers have been Technophobic and rather snobbish and they have little televisions. They don't like buying big screen TVs and all that jazz You know, it's that world that you're fighting against the teachers and not the kids and their parents They've all got sky-plus in broadband So, you know, I think I'm not too sure that I buy the Effort that's been put on there. So certainly don't believe in the current method And the levy of course has gone so nobody will pay for it. Okay. Well, thank you very much Donald Great way to start the conference. I think and that's all food for thought for us