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Lectures

Lectures are teaching activities that typically take place with a larger audience and are asymmetrical: a lecturer mostly talks while the audience mostly listens. Interactivity is important but is limited by the larger audience: not all participants will be able to actively engage in conversations; however, items that don't require conversation, such as questions, are a good way to engage all participants, as we discuss below. Practical sessions, on the other hand, put participants in the position where they work on concrete items (tasks), and get involved in smaller groups discussions, with a more symmetrical interaction.

Lectures benefit from content materials that can be used by educators as preparation and / or during the actual delivery. In the following sections, we detail steps in preparing and (re)using lecture materials in Open Education Hub.

Lecture Materials​

We organize lecture materials according to lecture-specific activities. We reference them as presented in the "Developing and Organizing Content" section.

  • Visual support materials are used as support material for giving talks and engaging participants in discussions. They consist of:

    • Slides are the typical structured and simplified format for organizing ideas. The lecturer walks through slides and presents information by expanding ideas on the slides, and by engaging in discussions based on those ideas.

    • Media files are generally images or videos that represent a concept in an easier to grasp format. Diagrams, photos, recordings of actions / processes, recorded simulations fall under this category. They can be used either stand-alone or embedded into slides.

  • Practical support materials are used to demonstrate actual real-world applications of presented concepts. The lecturer is the one who uses the practical support materials to do live demonstrations and highlight concrete use cases. This may not be possible for certain topics, either because they are highly theoretical or because it is difficult to have a live setup. Where a live demonstration is not possible, a video recording (as a visual support material) may be used. They consist of guides used for demos.

  • Assessment materials are used to evaluate the knowledge and skills of participants, and to provide feedback on spots they need to focus more on. Typically they are to be used live during lectures, with their results providing immediate feedback and triggering discussions. They consist of questions presented as quizzes.

  • Offline self-study materials are to be used by participants outside lectures. They are detailed in the "Self-Study" section.

As other types of content, lecture materials are publicly available, and also open for contributions. Lecture materials are meant to be used live by educators during lectures and then offline by learners, to improve gained knowledge and skills. Visual support materials are directly available on the course website; the other materials are available either as downloadable archives or directly in the course repository.

Lecture Content Structure​

Educators have individual styles and preferences. Hence, they would define their preferred order of presenting topics and decide on the weight of each topic.

Even so, it is recommended that the types of materials shown above be intertwined during an actual lecture. Slides are good for presenting general topics, but tend to become tern and difficult to follow.