The TEDification of the Large Lecture

Mark Lavery

For more than 20 years, Kathleen M. Greaves has taught large, lecture-based courses at Oregon State University in a classroom that seats 600. Keeping students engaged is always a challenge — and sometimes it’s hard enough just to keep the students in the balcony from chattering as she teaches.

By the third week of a new semester, Ms. Greaves, a senior instructor in the university’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences, typically notices more students using laptops to watch movies or shop on Amazon, marking a clear disengagement with the course — particularly among those in the balcony. “Forget them,” she says. “They are the most disengaged students.”

Over the years, her frustration has led to her to wonder if there was a better way to grab the attention of students. How can professors engage learners in a large lecture?

It’s a question that many professors struggle to answer. A Chronicle reader recently posed it to us, in response to a series in which we ask readers what puzzles them about innovations in higher education. The question received the most votes, so we set out to discover how institutions are evolving the large lecture.

Plenty of colleges are working on the problem, but the biggest new effort we heard about is at Oregon State, where some of the largest classes are becoming elaborate productions inspired by popular entertainment.

Last year the university finished construction of a new Learning Innovation Center, filled with alternative-style lecture halls and classrooms. The largest is a 600-seat arena named LInC100. It looks more like a TED talk venue than a lecture hall. The seats encircle a central stage, and large screens wrap around the room, surrounding participants. The professor is free to roam with a headset microphone, much like a pop star would wear during a concert. The arena’s nickname is the “Phil Donahue room” because it was partly inspired by the talk-show host known for a roundtable studio with audience members in the background.

Ms. Greaves, who is teaching her third term in the room, says she’ll never go back to the old lecture hall. Why? So far she’s had to ask students to quiet down only once.

Each Class ‘Like a Play’

About four years ago, Ms. Greaves and more than a dozen professors began working with a team of architects at the Portland-based architecture firm Bora to brainstorm the ideal teaching environment in order to engage students in large classes.

The group considered a number of experimental room types, all inspired by nonacademic gatherings: fashion runways, nightclubs, club lounges, government buildings, and sports arenas.

The final building includes several experimental classroom layouts. There’s one inspired by the British Parliament, one where the seating arrangement is fan-shaped, several flexible studio-style rooms, and the LInC100 arena, along with a smaller 300-seat version with a similar floor plan.

Michael Tingley and Amy Donohue, both principals at Bora, say the new rooms were designed using studies of proxemics, which show that students learn better when they are closer to the professor.

“There is an evolution in technology that is changing how institutions interact with their students,” Mr. Tingley says, adding that their aim was to make large lectures have a “campfire feel.”

Lynne L. Hindman, research coordinator at Oregon State, is conducting research of her own to analyze the effectiveness of teaching and learning in the new rooms. Ms. Hindman has gathered data from lectures taught in the LInC100 arena and plans to use heat-sensing cameras to identify movement patterns of the professors who teach in them. She hopes to map students’ grade-point averages to individual seats in the classroom, to see if placement correlates to grades.

During talks with the architects, Lesley M. Blair, a senior instructor of integrative biology at Oregon State, began to think about the appeal of venues that host events like comedy shows and concerts. “What is it that makes that memorable or entertaining?” she asked. Ms. Blair, who has studied effective learning in large lectures, says that to effectively engage students in large classes, professors need two things: attendance and attention. Her introductory biology course for nonmajors is part of a VividScience project in which she layers learning with the help of various mediums. The new LInC100 room has prompted her to think of her lectures as a performance more than ever before — like giving a TED talk, but more engaging, she says.

“It’s a wow room,” she says of the new arena. “It would be a total waste of time to do something that’s not dramatic in appearance.”

So she does. She thinks of each lecture like a play, with multiple acts and scenes played out with props on the stage and animations on the large screens. Before walking out on stage, she preps in the adjacent green room. She assembles her PowerPoint slides, but she also chooses a costume and props relating to the theme of the day. She sometimes wears a plushy brain hat when lecturing on the human body. And she has dressed up like Snow White when lecturing on ecological relationships and how forests shape cultural icons.

The room now has four aisles, so she can walk around and glare at students if they are talking. The acoustics also allow students to pose questions and actually hear one another from across the room.

The engaging elements of her lectures take a lot of work. For a 50-minute lecture, she says, she prepares for a full week and practices the hour before the lecture.

The course is taught with another professor, and it also has the support of 10 teaching assistants as well as staff members in the campus technology department.

Jedidiah W. Courage, a sophomore in mechanical engineering and a student in Ms. Blair’s course this semester, says he feels closer to the professor in the new lecture hall, and that brings a sense of urgency that makes him pay closer attention to the lecture.

“When you’re in a classroom that’s round, there’s a bit more accountability,” he says. “People can see you looking down at your lap.”

Mr. Courage says visuals outside of a standard PowerPoint play a big role in keeping students engaged in the course material and off social media.

“Everything is dark that you shouldn’t look at, and the lights are focused on the stage,” he says. “It feels like a constructed atmosphere for learning.”

Ms. Blair acknowledges that not every professor may have the resources to conduct performance lectures, and she doesn’t depend on her props and animations. One day, she recalls, her technology failed and she had to lecture “old-school.” Even without technology, she says, a conscious effort to engage students will pay off in outcomes later.

“Our job is to make it memorable, enjoyable, so they will use it,” she says about the subject matter. “That’s partly through the activities, but it’s also the language.”

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