The orator's obituary

The lecture was invented in the 5th century bc. Now it has had its day, says John Wakeford

What, one muses, reminded of Darwin's experience as one sits through yet another colleague's inaugural, will first-generation students select as best buy or value for money? Will it be lectures?

The origins of the oratorical teaching format are usually identified as Plato's texts of Socrates' 5th century bc discussions in the pleasure gardens of Athens. It developed as part of the democratic process in classical Greece. The often rehearsed, but apparently improvised performance became the model for higher education, later modified in medieval society. Although manuscripts became more accessible and less expensive, the lecture remained the prime method of university teaching for 2,500 years.

In 1964, Bruce Truscott advised freshers: "You are now going to have lectures every day, during term, for three or four years, and it may be some time before the mere act of concentration, for nearly an hour, on one person's voice, ceases to be strange to you."

Such performances are now meticulously scored (but apparently unquestioned) by every teaching quality assessment team in the United Kingdom.

But, surprisingly, little attention has been devoted to a thorough and systematic evaluation of its contribution to student learning. Few scholarly treatises on higher education examine its basic pedagogy, and, although next month's Dearing report on higher education may be informed by commissioned research on student attitudes, empirical investigation of university teaching for the past 30 years has largely been limited to local discipline-based studies.

If we were starting afresh, with the problem of how best to get a large percentage of the population to understand difficult and complex ideas, it is doubtful that the lecture would immediately spring to mind as the solution.

With the advent of mass higher education and greater interest in the curricula, uncritical confidence in the method should have dissolved, particularly in view of the increasing focus on student employability. A pedagogy so closely associated with student passivity should surely be under increasing scrutiny.

However, the lecture remains central. Despite mounting critiques by Graham Gibbs, Lewis Elton and associates, it remains essential currency. The major teaching career grades in higher education are still lecturer, senior lecturer and principal lecturer.

Course approval forms and timetables are framed around lectures. Raked lecture theatres have been built in the most modern university buildings.

And, although attendance registers have never crossed the Scottish border, most local authorities, parents and students (and some academics) measure the work of students by the assiduity and regularity of their attendance at lectures.

The continuous decline in staff:student ratios has inexorably led to larger classes in all institutions. But signs that the formal lecture system is under strain include persistent reports of two important trends.

Some staff report declining attendance after the first few lectures, a row of tape recorders in front of the lectern and student requests that the lecturers themselves provide recordings or full transcripts of their material. Others experience high attendance but are confronted with rows of silent acquiescence.

When over half of students now have paid employment during term, financial pressures force them as well as staff to cost their time. Many institutions are fully aware that the standard of performance of their staff compares poorly with that of media professionals and that alternative sources of the information can be tapped not only in libraries but also through essay banks, the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Academic knowledge is no longer confined to a closed system nor is the academic's privileged status required to unlock the secret garden. Little time or skill is needed to download material from sources across the world.

The traditional lecture seems cheap. But, delivered by an untrained academic with all too little time for preparation, it can be expensive for the student - particularly for the mature or part-time student with employment, parental or other obligations.

Future purchasers of higher education will be looking for institutions that provide them with degrees on the most cost-effective basis. They will be seeking greater flexibility to meet their diverse needs and contemporary lifestyles, and teaching that builds on their background knowledge and matches their preferred styles of learning.

Of course some university teachers have modified the format and mode of delivery of their lectures. Overheads, slide projectors and videos are supplemented by breaks for feedback and student-led discussion. And some institutions, led by new universities such as Thames Valley and East London confronted by waves of first-generation students, are developing such styles, converting lecture theatres and investing in the necessary hardware. But students report that overall the lecture retains a tenacious grip on the pedagogical repertoire in higher education.

In the research carried out for the Hale and the Robbins Committees in the 1960s the extent and popularity (but not efficacy) of different teaching methods was briefly examined. It established that, as the predominant form of university teaching across all faculties from Oxbridge to redbrick, the lecture method was overwhelmingly favoured among dons. For them it performed an essential control function, to give guidance to students considered too immature to select reading material of their own choice and to discuss their own ideas: "Without guidance of this kind the young student . . . may be bewildered by the multiplicity of books, some of which are unsuitable for beginners."

Academics of the 1960s also claimed that through the lecture they had the potential to "awaken a critical attitude", "infect a wider circle of students with his (sic) enthusiasm" and safeguard a student from a single tutor's "undue ascendancy of his pupil's mind". "Even when," enthused educationalist David Layton, "the student hardly understands a word that is said".

Buttressed by the formal examination system the lecture course presented an opportunity for the academic to set the parameters and retain control of the curriculum. The layout of the lecture theatre reproduced a clear structure of power relations and the norms of audience behaviour emphasised the traditional dichotomy of teacher and taught.

Institutional satisfaction with this mode of delivery was in contrast not wholly shared by the majority of its consumers. Students' practical experience of actual lecture courses raised for many of them a greater degree of scepticism.

Student opinion presented to the Hale committee was highly critical of the lecture. Of all the teaching experienced by students they identified this mode as an "out-dated, one-way process", "incapable of stimulating academic discussion of any value". They demanded fewer lectures and a greater emphasis on discussion and particularly practical projects. Echoes of their dissatisfaction could be heard on the streets in the critiques some of their leaders forced on the nation later in that decade.

Research by John McLeish at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s and a comprehensive review by Donald Bligh of some small-scale comparisons between lectures and other teaching methods suggested that lectures, even when they can transmit some limited information, are an ineffective means of stimulating thought and changing attitudes: "There is no guarantee that these purposes are achieved even by the generality of performers."

Most institutions are belatedly addressing the training of lecturers. New, even experienced academics, faced with quality assessment, class evaluations and the occasional litigious student, find even traditional teaching methods challenging - an experience characterised by David Allan as "talking the tightrope". They also not only welcome consideration in national training workshops (such as Lancaster's new approaches to university teaching) of alternatives but also of how interactive methods can make the best of the economies of large classes.

But a major worry remains. Most modern students appreciate courses where objectives are clear, knowledge is circumscribed and risk of failure minimised. Innovative teachers often report that new generations of students, driven to establish their credibility in the jobs market, pursued by their bank managers, rushing from class to job and back, actually prefer a teaching method based on passivity and certainty. A colleague found that videos of her lectures, made to cover her absence in Antarctica, had been more popular than the live versions.

The question is, how will teaching quality reviews distinguish between the popularity and the adequacy of student learning experience?

John Wakeford is director of the School of Independent Studies at Lancaster University. From August he will head the new Missenden Centre for the Development of Higher Education.