One of the classes I teach is the Big Introduction to the Discipline course (BID). The BID covers roughly 2500 years, several emphasis areas, myriad topics, and countless methods. Though there are several competing canons and disciplinary narratives, the department I teach in is rather roguish about fitting into any of the standard narratives (proponents would call us eclectic, detractors would call us irresponsible). So, right off the bat, presenting the discipline as reflected in my department poses a challenge to teaching the BID. But the bigger challenges are the teaching context and adapting to the particular student body (and student bodies) filling the lecture hall, (or lecture stadium as it sometimes feels).
The teaching context is a lecture hall that holds about 400 students. The cap on the course is 300, and I'll let in latecomers over the cap. As we all know, one cannot teach a class of 300 students in exactly the same way one teaches 35 students (which is the size of my "small" classes). I tend to be more successful in the smaller settings where I can speak in a more conversational style and tone, where discussion can be fostered, where unforeseen lines of thought can be followed (i.e., what in larger settings are disparagingly described as "going off on tangents" or "loving to hear himself talk"), and where I can have awareness of the actual individuals in the room with me. Another part of the teaching context is that every student getting a major in our department has to take this course and pass it with a C- or better. Making this situation much more sticky is that the undergraduate committee just this past semester created prerequisite requirements for about 75% of our course offerings requiring the previous passing of the BID course with a grade of C (not C-) or better. Making this situation even stickier still is that, until very recently, passing the BID course was never a prerequisite for anything except graduating, which meant that people could take the Introduction their last semester. I still feel this pinch as most of my students in the BID are upperclassmen (or is it upperclasspeople?). As a result, the class has a recent history of being packed with people who, rather than taking the BID to see if this is the right major for them, are simply trying to get an annoying hurdle out of the way at the very last minute.
I should mention at this point that this course is almost always taught as a once-a-week, 3-hour night class.
Most of us are aware of the steady decrease in attention spans of American youth. Most of us are also aware that this decrease in attention span coexists with an increase in mediated, fragmented, truncated, branded, and packaged information, if not also styles of communication. Part of me wants to do anything I can to adapt to the learning styles created by the mediated information age; but another part of me wants to create traditional learning styles in my students, wrought from the era of the book and the crumbling medium of writing. From both parts, I feel like I have to do something. I was shocked last semester when nearly 200 students failed the midterm—a midterm that was rudimentary multiple choice of the first level of Bloom's taxonomy of learning variety. Yet the point that I needed to change something was driven home as I read the written feedback on the course evaluations and found that the only significant complaint was an inability to follow my lectures because they consisted mainly of
speaking about their
readings and about themes and trends in the discipline. They will get lost early in the class period and switch their attention to their sidekicks and text messaging devices. If there isn't a power point slide, they don't know what to write down (so they write down nothing). If there isn't a multimedia presentation, or the screening of a video, there is simultaneously not enough internal stimulation to keep their attention and too many external distractions to keep their focus. The way I'm going to try to manage all of this, in order to maintain rigor with the material and adjust to the student's communicative needs, is by podcasting the lecture material.
I'm not going to podcast lectures
qua lectures, though. That would only be a mediated version of the very thing that doesn't work already. You see, what doesn't work for students is listening to an average professor (not some super-eloquent and animated professor like Cornel West) talk to 300 people. What most of these 300 people want is someone to talk to them in an interpersonal and conversational way. And, given the technology and the equipment I have, I can do just that by speaking into a microphone and imagining that I am speaking directly to an individual student. You see, what else doesn't work for students is listening to one person talk for 3 hours, or one hour, or even 30 minutes straight. So, I'm going to break down my lecture material into specific points and issues, trying to create pedagogical units (we can call them lecturemes if we want) that can fit into 10 minute segments. And they will be able to listen at their own pace, in their own place, with controls (pause, rewind, volume control), and hopefully in the less distracting sonic world of headphones. This way I can talk students through texts (even telling them to pause the file and read a passage or revisit something else), explain ideas in manageable chunks, include audio examples, and even interview specialists in specific areas of study for variety (and ethos).
Several of you have already been shaking your head and saying, "but now no one will come to class." I thought about this possibility quite a bit. My knee-jerk response is that coming to class didn't do any good for two-thirds of the class last semester, so at least they have a chance to learn something from the audio files. But I'm just being facetious here, and don't want to envision this class as a kind of correspondence course. All that time students spend engaging instruction outside of class does lead me to some important questions about what to do with my three hours one night a week. Since they will have (or at least have the responsibility to have) experienced the lecture material on their own time, what will I do in place of the time I used to lecture? First, I will have a question and discussion period to give students a chance to take up the responsibility of their own learning (and to smooth over real confusions that may arise in readings and podcasts). Second, I will have graded in-class activity that make students engage the material in some new context or scenario. If these activities add up to a significant enough portion of the grade, then the students will have a practical reason to attend class. Third, I (or one of the TAs) will present a few more relevant examples or thought issues to further extend the learning process. Fourth, sometimes the time could be used to present a more detailed media example (like a film) because I won't need to devote the period to lecture.
All in all, the shift will be away from me as the source of teaching to the students as the source of learning (the learning paradigm that education specialists have been discussing for at least 15 years). If students fail to listen to the podcasts, their learning will suffer, but they won't be able to (reasonably) blame me. I still wonder, though, if I should keep them in the classroom the entire three hours if I've assigned them to listen to audio lectures (in addition to assigned readings) outside of class time. Given last semester's grades, I feel like they need to spend more time with the course material, but I;m not sure what's fair here.
Since I have already taught the course a few times, I won't need to come up with all new material for the podcasts, though I will have to be diligent about being efficient with the "studio time" preparations. I'm confident that I can pull it off. I am hopeful that it will increase learning.
Let me add that I would not want to do this for other courses, especially the smaller ones.
