The advance of interactive education

It’s terribly quiet in the lecture hall. ‘No one?’ the lecturer asks hesitantly. The students all look down at their notes or hide behind their laptop screens. In the end, the lecturer provides the answer themselves. It’s another failed attempt at interaction.

According to Birgit Snijder-Kuipers, university lecturer of notarial law at the RUG and junior civil-law notary at legal firm De Brauw in Amsterdam, this is fairly common. ‘If students know you will be calling on them, they tend to hide.’

Standing up

Ever since she started in education, Snijder-Kuipers has been trying to increase participation in her lectures, challenging students. How? By standing up rather than sitting down, for example. ‘It creates a different dynamic, because you interact on a different level.’ Whenever a student wants to join the discussion, Snijder-Kuipers throws them a plush die with a microphone embedded in it (called a Catchbox).

Students remember the material better, and their grades improve

Snijder-Kuipers came up with her method herself, but it perfectly matches a broader movement: the flipped classroom. This phenomenon, invented by flipped classroom guru Eric Mazur from Harvard, came to the RUG in 2015. The RUG Education Support and Innovation centre (ESI) offers a course in how to flip a classroom for lecturers.

The idea behind the ‘flip’ is that a lecture can be so much more than just one person transferring information to students. Students should become active and play with the material during class. This results in a livelier class; students remember the material better, and their grades improve. The old style of lectures often fail in these regards.

Do away with lectures

Some of Mazur’s followers even say that the classical lecture should be done away with. Snijder-Kuipers won’t go that far, but she doesn’t think the classical style of lectures will exist in twenty years. ‘Just listening for two hours while barely interacting is too old-fashioned’, she says. ‘Students learn differently nowadays. The ever-increasing digitisation and speed require students have different skills.’

Just listening for two hours while barely interacting is too old-fashioned

Modern times and digital gadgets aren’t the reason why associate professor Diederik Roest argues for more interaction in class. He mainly looks at the research results. ‘Time and again, they show that this way is more efficient’, he says, sure of himself.

Several years ago, Roest introduced the use of voting devices. He would ask all the students a single question, and after the first round of voting would split them up into smaller discussion groups. This is where the peer element comes into play: by discussing the material together, the students absorbed it better. The method proved successful: ‘Almost everyone answered correctly during the second round of voting. Apparently the saying “wisdom of the crowd” is correct.’ In the meantime Roest, who bases ten percent of students’ final grade on how they vote in class, has replaced the voting device with the online software Mentimeter, which displays the results in real time.

Professor of private law Charlotte Pavillon also uses this system, and she is very happy with it. ‘It works really well for legal education, especially in the master phase’, she says. ‘Students can have different opinions on certain Supreme Court decisions. Online polls are a great way to find out who thinks what.’

Quiz

Lecturers who want to involve students before class actually starts can use various programs. Snijder-Kuipers has students make their own quiz using the program Kahoot!. ‘It fosters self-teaching in an informal way, and the volunteer who actually makes the quiz gets a little present.’

Professor of literary theory Pablo Valdivia turns his classes into TED talks by preparing using Perusall: an online platform that allows students to read and annotate the class literature. ‘The program monitors what they find difficult, which means I know what to focus on in class’, he says. ‘It makes class so much more dynamic.’ In order to keep everyone on their toes during class, he asks a few questions every twenty minutes.

Warming up

Not everyone needs fancy programs to makes their lectures more interactive. Bayu Jayawardhana, professor of mechatronics and non-linear control technology, does it old school. In order to warm up the room, he starts with a group quiz. One of the students is asked to write the results on an old-fashioned blackboard. If the answer is correct, the ‘winner’ receives an origami figure, folded by Jayawardhana himself.

All this creativity during lectures is great of course, but what do the students make of it? Course evaluations have shown that the method is a success, and according to the lecturers, the response during class is a positive one. Only a few students dislike it, preferring to just listen for two hours. Especially Valdivia scores high on interaction, earning a 4.8 out of 5. ‘It’s important to come up with several proper goals, as well as a plan of attack, at the beginning of a course’, he says. ‘That way, students know what’s being asked of them.’

Culture shock

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out, says educational researcher Cor Suhre. In the 2015-2016 academic year, he researched new educational methods for the European law course, which has been a stumbling block for bachelor students for years. Students were asked to prepare by watching videos the lecturers had made themselves and doing assignments that would be discussing during the lecture. ‘But they hated that’, says Suhre. ‘In hindsight, I think the culture shock was too big. Law students are used to just sitting there and listening to the lecturers’, he explains. His research came to an end: the flipped classroom had failed.

I won’t say that we should have all flipped classrooms, all the time

So whether the concept works varies for each faculty, says rector magnificus Elmer Sterken. ‘A maths lecture demands a completely different form of interaction than a philosophy class,’ he says. Nevertheless, he believes in the power of interaction, because there are different people, with different characters, in the lecture hall. ‘If you manage to establish contact with the individual students you can create a richer learning environment.’

Sterken expects lecturers to keep looking for a way to interact more. And, he says, this is important. But he does not propose dispensing with the classical lecture altogether. ‘I won’t say that we should have all flipped classrooms, all the time. It’s good for students to train themselves in sitting still and listening for ninety minutes. And there will always be people who know how to tell a good story.’

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