Assignment 4 - Improving LT learning experience

I did this assignment with Nelson and Yee Shiang on improving learning experience in lecture theatre (LT). We had taken several types of study, mainly using laddering technique and ethnographic study: observation. We went to crash a lecture in the engineering faculty to observe the behaviours of students and how the lecture is conducted in an objective manner. The lecture that we attended was IE2101 Introduction to System Design.

We decided to embark onto this journey as we wanted to sit in the lecture to observe a lecture from a third person point of view.

And here are some of the observations that we found:
- students not paying attention
- chatting
- eating
- MSN-ing with that laptop
- lecturer droning throughout the whole lecture
- late-comers
- bland lecture slides
- students sleeping

Overall the whole an hour lecture was bland, boring and noisy (restless noises from the students). Even those who tried to listen attentively to the lecture were beginning to feel bored, started to fall asleep and find entertaining things to do like chatting with their friends. It was quite appalling for the lecturer to keep on lecturing without bothering whether the students were paying attention or not. I thought usually lecturers would pause to let the students know that they should be keeping quiet and pay attention. But in this lecture, it was really weird. Maybe the lecturer wasn't that experienced or he just didn't bothered.

Another thing was that the lecture slides were extremely wordy. Since the topic he was teaching was quite theory-centred with complex ideas, I thought he should give a clearer explaination by illustrating with diagrams and examples. Worse, he did not even pause to ask whether the students had any questions or not.


We also did the laddering approach to find out how students in general felt about the learning experience in LTs. Although by the end of the interview, many of them were quite irritated by the style of the laddering approach, most of them replied the environment was a huge factor in determining a great learning experience; while one of the them replied that all didn't matters as long as the lecturer is good in teaching and the lecture is interesting. Basically, having the mindset to learn in an interesting lecture is enough to raise the learning experience.

What the solutions that we proposed:
- compulsory effective communication courses for lecturers
- a committee to review the teaching ability of the lecturers
- graded participation for the students
- students can text message the lecturers questions via some system


From the results of these observations, I find that learning experience in LTs depends on a lot of factors. Mainly, having a comfortable environment like air-con at the right temperature (not too cold or hot); lightings comfortable on the eyes, soft-comfy chairs, visible projector screen etc. I felt that having an interesting lecturer was an very important factor in raising learning experience in LT. If the lecturer was droning on and on non-stop without injecting any humour or jokes, the lecture would probably be very boring and made students want to sleep rather than concentrate. Distractions from other students could proved to be quite fatal as other students would not be able to be concentrating on the lecture.