Part of the 'Teaching politics and IR online: “design matters” webinar series' run by BISA and the Political Studies Association (PSA).
Speaker: Maxine David (Leiden)
One of the refreshing curiosities of the current pandemic situation is that large numbers of academics are debating less the wrongs or otherwise of lectures, and more the question of how best to deliver them. This session begins, therefore, by asking whether and when a lecture is the appropriate teaching tool in a programme designed for face-to-face teaching but driven online by circumstance.
Connected to this, we think about how to identify the relative merits of a lecture delivered asynchronously versus one delivered synchronously. We talk about the range of considerations to be borne in mind when making these two decisions, that range moving beyond the usual need to assure alignment among lecture, course and programme and on to a consideration of who the students are, the environment in which they might be studying and the unequal needs they are likely to have. Some time is spent answering questions about platforms and lecture techniques but also on the matter of how to anticipate problems and pre-empt them.
In a final section, we consider possibilities for sharing lectures across courses, universities, programmes, even countries; in other words, how to use online lectures to break down borders and build connected classrooms.
