The On-line Lecture

by Evelyn Beck

Conscientious instructors wouldn’t think of spending a class period reading to their students in a monotone from lecture notes that only summarize the homework reading assignment. Lectures, we all know, need to capture students’ interest. Nevertheless, when it comes to on-line lectures, that same care is rarely applied. Perhaps because we lack the time to craft an illuminating written lecture for each section of our on-line courses, most of us resort to sticking dry lecture notes onto our Web sites, hoping that they will help students understand the material. However, in the process, we cheat our on-line students of what we routinely deliver to our in-class students: our sense of humor, our memorable anecdotes to highlight factual information, and our passion for the subject.

Here are some tips to improve your on-line lectures:

1. Start small. Begin with one lecture for one topic in one class. Otherwise, the prospect of writing dozens of lectures is too overwhelming.

2. Keep it short. Many lectures ramble, with links to subtopics that sometimes lead to sub-subtopics. While making such information available somewhere on the site as a resource for students is a good idea, limit the lecture to about 1000 words in order to keep students engaged.

3. Make it personal. Few on-line lectures give a sense of the instructor’s personality. While certain subjects lend themselves to personal reflections more than others, every good teacher ventures at least an opinion, if not a personal story, during a lecture. Here’s an excerpt from a lecture about melody and rhythm by Linda Kobler, an adjunct instructor of music in the Virginia Community College System:

When my mother was a teenager growing up in Puerto Rico (in the 1920s) she remembers that young boys would stand beneath the window of their girlfriends and serenade them with a guitar and a beautiful melody. My mom remembers how she actually helped out a young guy who was having some trouble with his sweetheart, by composing a lovely tune for him to sing. The way she tells it, the melody worked its magic, and he was forever in her debt. It may be a romantic notion, but there is power in a good melody (http://omnidisc.com/MUSIC/Lecture1.html).
In a lecture about how to use the Internet for research, I included the following embarrassing admission to highlight the need for checking a source’s authenticity:
A few years ago, I made the very stupid mistake of believing something I’d read on-line just because it had been posted at several different sites. It was supposedly the commencement address given by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at Yale University in which he’d said that diplomas are for losers. I then referred to this statement in a magazine article I wrote about how important a college degree was in the hiring process. Unfortunately, the editor didn’t discover the problem until after publication, and I was mortified.

4. Write in a conversational style. Write it the way you would say it. For example, here’s the opening line of a lecture about the stop and frisk law by Thomas O’Connor, who teaches justice studies at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount: “Frequently, the police will observe somebody who needs to be checked out” (http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/frisk.htm) Here’s the opening line of a section about the fifth-century conflict between the Greeks and Persians by Norman Raiford, a history professor at Greenville Technical College in Greenville, S.C.: “What was the beef with the Persians?” (http://wellspring.isinj.com/sample/wciv/wciv1/assignment_3_2.htm). Compare these clear and intriguing statements to an opaque sentence full of jargon that fails to illuminate complex
topics.

5. Draw connections to everyday things. As we all know, comparing new ideas to what students already understand fosters learning. Here’s another example from Linda Kobler’s lecture on melody and rhythm which links musical scales to fabric:

To use an analogy, then, think of scales as a kind of fabric which is used to make an article of clothing. Some fabrics have associations and lend themselves to certain uses. Given a bolt of burlap you probably wouldn’t fashion a wedding gown out of it. Neither would you be likely to use silk brocade to make gardening pants! Scales, in the mind of composers, work much the same way, to suggest broadly the type of musical feeling they wish to create. (http://omnidisc.com/MUSIC/Lecture1.html)

Here’s an example from a lecture I composed on writing style in which I compare styles of prose to fashion:

When my mind wanders in church, I look at the woman who always wears hats or the high school senior with an amazing collection of scarves to see what they’re wearing. There’s someone else who’s always got an intricate hairstyle. And then there’s me—I put on whatever doesn’t need to be ironed and try to remember to brush my hair. Each of us has an identifiable style.

And here’s part of a lecture by Amar Patel about linear regression. It is for a statistics course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he’s discussing crickets in order to explain how to find relationships between two variables:

Factoid: Crickets make their chirping sounds by rapidly sliding one wing over the other. The faster they move their wings, the higher the chirping sound that is produced. Scientists have noticed that crickets move their wings faster in warm temperatures than in cold temperatures. Therefore, by listening to the pitch of the chirp of crickets, it is possible to tell the temperature of the air. (http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/patel/amar430/keyprob1.html)

On-line lectures offer a slightly different challenge than the oratories you deliver in the classroom. However, with a little effort, the on-line lecture can be just as enriching as any in-class oratory.