Abstract:

Nowadays students have grown in the ‘digital age’. They use social apps, manage smartphones, tablets, and… mostly tend to avoid speeches. Also they like much to do things by themselves, especially in the digital world. These trends that many teachers and lecturers can observe daily play against the traditional lecture. In K-12 and high schools the traditional lecture is already being transformed into a more active class, with gamification playing an important role. This happens in many schools around the world. However in higher education the lecture always have been settled as an important way to transmit knowledge and experience. In fact it has constituted the basis of teaching for centuries.

The traditional lecture at higher education can change in order to gain student engagement. But how?
Firstly, there is a pedagogical approach called Flipped Classroom or Flipped Learning that was born in 2008 when Bergman and Sams [1] tried to give students some lessons at home with good results. So one basement of Flipped philosophy is the homework. The students read, do exercises, watch videos, etc. at home making contact with specific concepts and contents. Later, in the classroom, the teacher can work starting with those contents, making questions, setting tasks, solving them, working in groups or individually… The students already know about the contents so the work at class allow to fix and to go in deep in them. The main goal is to achieve more profound and significant learning.

Flipped Learning is very useful to improve student engagement and participation in class. But Flipped approach can also be useful for lectures, because it previously introduces the students to the matters and the contents. Then the teacher can module at classroom how much time he/she devotes to the traditional lecture and how much time to the new strategy, and which issues must be dealt with through traditional mode or by Flipped mode. Students do not stay passive the whole class, but some parts can be involved in a more active way thanks to Flipped Classroom.

Secondly, ICT also can play an important role in helping the traditional lecture. One way is making easier and enhancing the Flipped implementation. For example, reinforcing the concepts making online test for homework through Google Forms. Test are available at anytime and everywhere (which means ubiquitous learning) so the students can work at their own pace. Other way is directly supporting the lecture. For example, the students wear smartphones the whole day and sometimes they use them in class, which means distraction and time spent. The teacher can make stops in the lecture to pulse the student assimilation with a quick survey with smartphones. The lecturer is able to show the results, so the students know their skills (feedback). This also help in student attention, as they are expectant. The students also feel more involved and active in class, as they use their own devices. Socrative and DirectPoll are some of the most known apps for doing quick surveys and test in class.

These tools and others have been used in this work with good results and can be transferred to different knowledge areas. However, every lecturer/professor must develop his/her own strategy to improve the traditional lecture and transform it in an attractive and efficient way of teaching for the students.

References:
[1] J. Bergmann & A. Sams, “Remixing Chemistry Class”, Learning & Leading With Technology, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 22–27, 2008.

Keywords:

Lecture, traditional lecture, Flipped Classroom, engagement, higher education, educational innovation.