Large Lecture Course: Pop quiz, Note-taking, and Multimedia
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I have been teaching for 40 years. I have taught big lecture classes the past few years. The most important thing to learn in teaching is that there are a number of ways to do it. Everyone has his/her personality and every teacher can use that to his/her advantage. Do not go into teaching thinking that there is one way to teach and do constantly try to match style and discipline.
One thing I always use with the students in large lecture classes that was effective was the pop quizzes. I asked them to take four 10-point quizzes throughout the semester, unannounced. No excuses including absences. We would always drop the lowest grade, but the quizzes were quick and short. They were designed to see if the students recalled things from previous lectures and kept up with the work. It kept attendance up and prevented students from e-mailing and sleeping in class. It set a tone that listening and coming to class was important.
Another thing was that I had my TA’s check the student’s notes to see what they learned in class. I never put the powerpoints up before class, only 36 hours after. The idea was “what did the student take down?” Knowing what the student thought was important and what they learned was very enlightening to me.
When lecturing in large classes, multimedia usage is very beneficial. I first started out getting important relevant pictures/information, but then I moved onto to integrating clips, from chosen movies and interview work I did from another class. The critical point is you do not tell a student to watch a whole CNN series, but rather to utilize the portion of the series that is important to your particular teaching. It is important to edit and work that piece of material into the class so it is an integral part of the class. That is the hardest part about it, it takes a good amount of time to get the precise clip, but it is very very well worth it. Out of a 47 minute video, I used a 3 minute clip about Castro in one class and another clip for another lecture.
Certainly, people of my generation are not as comfortable with multimedia, but I am just hoping our younger generation is more comfortable finding useful multimedia from, youtube and great tv shows they have seen and work them into the class.
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