02 April 2003

In 'E-nhance Lectures' (Journal of digital Information - free access online) Larissa Naber and Monika Köhle look closely at the phases of a student's interaction with a lecture course (by 'take a lecture' I guess they mean lecture course). This highlights the unusability of much lectureware for students. The article looks realistically and sympathetically at lecturer needs too. Phase 1 - reconnoitering: Before deciding to take a lecture or exam students want a detailed overview of the topics covered. Some students refer to is as the "90 minutes notes'' or "executive summary''. Many lectures fail to provide support for this stage. Phase 2 - learning the basics: After deciding to take the exam most students read through the material available (and try to solve the exercises). In this stage they try to focus on the main points. Many lecture notes do not differentiate between essential, important, and additional information. Support is generally there, but it could be improved from the student's point of view. Phase 3 - exam preparation: Most students make custom notes of the topics they need to study further. Most classic materials provide no support for this stage; all excerption is done by hand. Although these excerpts can be of great pedagogical value, they cannot be integrated with original materials efficiently. Phase 4 - reference: Lecture notes should not be worthless after the exam. Human memory being as it is, it is often necessary to return to previous "haunts" to look up what has been forgotten. While some books come with a decent index, most lecture notes do without, so information retrieval can be tedious. Phase 5 - selective retrieval: This phase is set apart from the other four phases: without detailed knowledge of the information provided the student wishes to retrieve selective parts that might be required for a different subject matter. Chances of extracting just the relevant information are slim. Prerequisites for later chapters tend to be scattered across various chapters, forcing the student to canvas the material completely. 10:27:06 AM    comment []