Folks,
I have always been a handout person, as people who have seen one of my presentation booklets will know; trees are nature's way of turning carbon dioxide into information.
For lectures, I use a fairly detailed set of notes ("headings and full text"), and I give them out at the lecture. They are also available on the e-learning environment, where I provide further notes and the lecture powerpoints (not pictures of the screens, the actual powerpoints). I provide the whole module on the e-learning environment at the beginning of the course, although I add any new stuff that happens while the module is in progress. I find that students who want to "read ahead" appreciate this, and those that just want to know what's happening for that lecture are also happy. I'm still experimenting with the amount of info to put in the lecture notes, but I think the max is two sides of A4, 9pt text, single spacing, 2cm margins, 2 columns with a 1cm column gap - although I sometimes tweak these figures to make the writing fit. I'm not convinced that a long list of references is helpful in the notes, so I sometimes use in-text parenthetical referencing, but give the reference list for all the lecture notes as a separate document.
I've tended to concentrate on the powerpoints rather than the notes; I try to avoid screens full of words and instead use lots of pictures. I also keep a bank of cartoons, which can be surprisingly effective. There seems to be a critical mass of information - too little and the screen feels redundant; too much and it feels overly urgent. My experience is that four or five "factoids" per screen is optimal, but I'm still experimenting here.
I also tell the students that they can record the lectures if they want to, although none have yet done so this year. KCL is introducing automatic recording of all lectures, but this hasn't been fully rolled out yet.
Martin
-----Original Message-----
From: Teaching Linguistics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dave Sayers
Sent: 08 October 2015 09:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: lecture handouts
Hi everyone,
This might seem like a deathly boring question, but I think it's worth considering. I used to use no handouts at all, just uploading the slides and supplementary material (sometimes inherited handouts) to the course site. Nobody brought any of these to lectures though, at least not as far as I could see, and I saw some eyes wandering and wondered if it might be down to not having anything in front of them to follow along with. I've also previously used extremely detailed handouts, but that seemed to be a disincentive to paying any attention to the lecture. Why bother when it's all written in front of you? And then, since it's in front of you and also on the screen, why not just, y'know, quickly check Facebook, and hey, look at this! Hah hah... So I looked into it in a bit more detail and found this article which pretty much backed up what I'd thought was going on:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.2350020203/abstract. The article showed that too much detail (e.g. just printing out the slides) meant students had no incentive to write any notes; too little detail caused many to lose track of the overall lecture; while providing a skeleton structure (just the main headings plus a little detail) avoided both these pitfalls and led to the highest scores in a standardised recall test. Nowadays I tend to give a single sheet with minimal detail and any really key quotes. It's double-spaced too so that they can easily scribble in the spaces. I think it's striking a happy medium, as per the article, based on their movements in class, though I haven't surveyed my students about it.
What are other people's approaches to handouts? I haven't mentioned the many possibilities of electronic handouts; I think that's kind of a separate issue. I thought I'd focus here on tree-killing teaching methods.
Dave
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Dr. Dave Sayers
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University (2009-2015) [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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