Let’s have lectures only 45 minutes twice a week
Woody Allen once said:
My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.
Observing how boring and unoriginal lecturers (and thus lectures) at most of the university CS courses are, I suggest the lectures shall be limited to at most 1 hour at a time. So, the four hours per week of reading from slides would be reduced to half. Students can read the slides in their own time, teacher concentrates on what is important, courses (probably) become more compact, more practical by having better proportion of lectures/demos,… in short, only positive outcomes. (It’s your time to point out the negative ones in the discussion)
How do you like this proposal?
If you’re looking for ways of how to spice up lectures, I propose that lecturers must give their classes naked.
(I’m in a good position to suggest this as all my lectures are web-based)
So Matti already teaches naked, problem is that no one can see it…
Biggest problem I can see with this proposal is when the teacher considers everything relevant, and finds himself with too little time, which will always be too much for students…
Do you really think it is a problem, if no one can see when Matti teaches naked?
I discussed this matter with a couple of senior faculty members, and it seems that beginning from next fall, in our programming courses we give 2×45 mins of lectures a week, and emphasize other forms of teaching, including full-contact teaching ;-)
I’ve got to know the same too (after submitting this post), which is a great news. I hope this will make our students to finally buy a book and read and to not demand wasting of teachers’ time by copy&pasting materials to slides and parroting it during lectures.
Full contact-teaching or full-contact teaching will be great for both students and teachers. Imagine, your students come to the ‘discussion sessions’ prepared, with a lot of questions!
Yes indeed–there’s going to be a highly-recommended course book. (And they’re gonna buy that book if the course is gonna be based on that. In high school they were expected to buy all the course books! What should change when they come to university?)
(P.S. I prefer full-contact)