Online Education Gives Rise to the ‘Mini-lecture’

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Barbara Macaulay

Barbara Macaulay, UMassOnline CAO I love this quote below by Dalton A. Kehoe, an associate professor of communication studies at York University in Toronto. It is so honest, and so revealing of the fact that great teachers are learning new things all the time. By way of introduction, Mr. Kehoe has been teaching communications studies for decades. His traditional 50-minute-long lectures have been highly praised for years. Then he started teaching online and started taping his 50-minute lectures:

“It was the most extremely boring thing my students had ever seen… I had to sit to down and look at these lectures and realize that when you’re looking at someone online as a talking head and shoulders in video, you just want to kill yourself after about 20 minutes…”

You can read more about Mr. Kehoe’s experience as well as a more complete review from those both in favor and opposed to shorter lectures in this Chronicle of Higher Education feature entitled, “Short and Sweet: Technology Shrinks the Lecture.” By most accounts, changes in the online lecture format and length have started to impact the format and length of lectures being given in traditional college classrooms. Students, say many of the experts, are used to shorter chunks of information and more time for related, self-directed, discovery. For example, one quoted source, Diane Zorn, an instructor at York University, has evolved to what she calls ‘mini-lectures.’ Notes the article:

Ms. Zorn mixes the short lectures with hands-on activities. In one recorded lecture for a course on reasoning, for instance, she asks students to pause the video, open up a worksheet from the course Web site, and watch a short clip from the film Bowling for Columbine while answering a series of questions about the arguments made in the clip.

I’d like to hear from you on this debate. If you’re an online student, what’s your lecture length preference; have your professors adapted their lectures to these times? Conversely, if you’re an online professor – especially one that has experience teaching both online and in the traditional classroom, have you changed your lecture perspective and if so, have the results been positive or not?