What is a maths lecture?
By a maths lecture I mean a standard pedagogic lecture given to undergraduates. This distinguishes it from a research talk given to a seminar or conference, and from popular lectures given to school pupils or a general audience, on the one hand, and other forms of undergraduate teaching, such as tutorials, problems classes and revision classes, on the other. I have particularly in mind lectures given to large audiences, say of at least 100 students.
Lectures of this type have the following characteristics:
1. They present the students with new material.
2. The lecture is the primary route by which students are exposed to this material.
3. There may be some interaction with the audience but the agenda is set by the lecturer (or the syllabus), and a main aim of the lecturer will be to transmit a predetermined amount of material.
4. The purpose of a mathematics lecture is to contribute to the learning of mathematics by the students.
How important are mathematics lectures?
From 2001 to 2009 I led a session on giving mathematics lectures at the MSOR Network Induction Course for New Lecturers. I began these sessions by asking the audience how important lectures were in their own degree courses. There were usually about 30 new lecturers in the audience who had been educated at a wide range of universities in the UK and abroad. Typically on a 4 point scale, 50% of the replies were that lectures were very important, and 40% that they were important.
This confirms my impression that in the 49 years since I first attended a mathematics lecture, very little has changed. Lectures are still the dominant form of teaching provided for mathematics undergraduates, and, despite some technological changes, what happens in the average mathematics lecture is pretty much the same as what happened 40 years ago, if not much earlier. It is not the purpose of this article to discuss whether this continued reliance on traditional lectures is the result of sound judgement or unthinking conservatism...
What is a maths lecture?
By a maths lecture I mean a standard pedagogic lecture given to undergraduates. This distinguishes it from a research talk given to a seminar or conference, and from popular lectures given to school pupils or a general audience, on the one hand, and other forms of undergraduate teaching, such as tutorials, problems classes and revision classes, on the other. I have particularly in mind lectures given to large audiences, say of at least 100 students.
Lectures of this type have the following characteristics:
They present the students with new material.
The lecture is the primary route by which students are exposed to this material.
There may be some interaction with the audience but the agenda is set by the lecturer (or the syllabus), and a main aim of the lecturer will be to transmit a predetermined amount of material.
The purpose of a mathematics lecture is to contribute to the learning of mathematics by the students.
How important are mathematics lectures?
From 2001 to 2009 I led a session on giving mathematics lectures at the MSOR Network Induction Course for New Lecturers. I began these sessions by asking the audience how important lectures were in their own degree courses. There were usually about 30 new lecturers in the audience who had been educated at a wide range of universities in the UK and abroad. Typically on a 4 point scale, 50% of the replies were that lectures were very important, and 40% that they were important.
This confirms my impression that in the 49 years since I first attended a mathematics lecture, very little has changed. Lectures are still the dominant form of teaching provided for mathematics undergraduates, and, despite some technological changes, what happens in the average mathematics lecture is pretty much the same as what happened 40 years ago, if not much earlier. It is not the purpose of this article to discuss whether this continued reliance on traditional lectures is the result of sound judgement or unthinking conservatism...
