Learning Curve: Lose the tedium in class

By Maureen Downey

In urging professors at Southern Methodist University to “teach naked,” José A. Bowen is not suggesting they doff their pants. Instead, SMU’s dean of the Meadow School of the Arts is asking teachers to shed classroom computers, tedious PowerPoints and long-winded lectures.

Nor should his decision to strip computers from SMU classrooms be considered evidence of a lunatic anti-technology bias.

A jazz musician by training, Bowen is a longtime champion of smart technology on campus, penning a compelling article on the topic for the National Teaching & Learning Forum (www.ntlf.com/html/ti/naked.htm). Last week, Bowen revisited the theme in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bowen advises fellow academics to stop wasting precious class time on announcements and logistical details. Instead, they should e-mail that information to their tech-savvy students, he says. Professors should also rely on e-mail to send follow-up comments from class discussions and to point students to relevant articles in the media or school newspaper.

But Bowen’s most provocative suggestion is that professors deliver more lectures to students via podcasts — a pre-recorded audio program posted to a Web site and available for download — prior to class. Professors can check on whether students have watched the lecture through Internet course management systems that allow them to quiz students online.

By handling the nuts-and-bolts material on the podcast, professors are free to save their good stuff, their “aha” moments, for live lectures and create more time for debate, discussion and problem-solving, Bowen says.

“Most of the lectures on campus are terrible,” Bowen tells the Chronicle in a video segment. “And you’d be better off watching somebody at Stanford or Harvard give the same lecture or give the same content in a way that was really top-notch. If everybody had to write their own textbooks, most textbooks would be lousy. Having fewer good textbooks is better for every discipline. Having fewer and better lectures would be better for every discipline.”

With the surge in cheaper online learning alternatives, Bowen says residential colleges must recognize that their franchise is under siege and find enticements to keep students coming.

“If your students are going to pay tens of thousands of dollars extra to come to your campus and live there and eat there and sleep there, there better be more than Monday-Wednesday-Friday at 10 o’clock lectures,” he says.

As Bowen knows, those lecture classes on comparative politics or world religions will be increasingly accessible to students online at steeply discounted prices. To protect their relevance and their appeal, residential colleges must introduce more discussion and more group projects — more reasons for students to physically interact with each other and their teachers, Bowen says.

That means extending academic discussions and contact beyond the classroom and into residential halls and campus life. Otherwise, Bowen warns that students will simply find the cheapest course from online sources anywhere in the world and then take it.

Although many colleges brag about their classroom computers and their interfaces, students still place great value on human interactions. A survey in a recent British Educational Research Journal found that six of 10 college students complained that class lectures and PowerPoints were boring.

Asked what they enjoyed most about learning, students gave the highest marks to seminars, group discussion and practical sessions — the classroom activities that typically don’t involve a computer screen or projector.

Research also suggests that students may actually retain more from basic college lectures delivered via podcasts. A study by the State University of New York in Fredonia — “iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace professors?” — found that students who downloaded a podcast lecture and took notes earned much higher test scores on the material than peers who attended a traditional lecture.

In the study, the authors offered a possible explanation:

“After the in-class lecture was over, students ... could only refer to notes they had taken during that session and copies of the PowerPoint slides that were presented. Those students could never go back and hear the lecture again as many times as they wanted. The students in the podcast condition were not given any specific instructions about how to use the podcasts to study. The majority of the students took notes from the podcasts, and they listened to it multiple times.”

The increasing efficiency of the Internet in delivering information faster and cheaper to students may have greater ramification than most of us realize to the traditional role of education.

“Traditional education has been built on the basic premise that information is scarce,” Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers cautioned last year. “But with the first phase of the Internet, information became anything but scarce. ... In this next phase, where information is available in real time to any device, in any mode, it won’t be the lack of information but how quickly educators and students can sort it, analyze it and use it.”


Maureen Downey can be reached at mdowney@ajc.com.