"The lecture hall is under attack." But still respected & enhanced at annual Lilly Conferences on College Teaching

[We'll discuss a Lilly Conference hybrid session this Friday 2pm ET online   Feb 17, 2012
"Dissect & Improve Hybrid Workshop &Update on Ender’s Test of Artificial Instruction"

For more about Lilly Conferences, see tlt.gs/LillyDirs2012]  


"The anti-lecture movement is fueled, too, by the proliferation of online lectures, which threaten the monopoly on learning long held by bricks-and-mortar campuses.
..."active learning is hard work..."
- excerpts above from "Colleges looking beyond the lecture" By Daniel de Vise, Published: February 15 online  and February16 hard copy in The Washington Post


The highly-respected annual Lilly Conferences on College & University Teaching demonstrate quite effectively their longstanding commitment to active learning. Even in these conferences, what is the most prestigious invitation?  To be a plenary session speaker! And most Lilly plenary sessions are predominantly large group lectures (audience usually 200 to 700 in one large room).  


However, most Lilly plenaries include some interactivities - small group discussion within the audience and active dialogue between audience and presenter. Perhaps equally important and unusual is the expectation that invited speakers stay for the full 3 days of the conference and participate in sessions and informal conversations.  So the Lilly plenary "lectures" are extended and enhanced both within the plenary sessions and by encouraging related interactions.




IMAGE selected and modified by Steve Gilbert 20120216
Question mark superimposed on Photo of "One of the large lecture halls hosted within the Curtis Lecture Halls building at York University." Date 01/18/08 Source "Theonlysilentbob"
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Curtis_Lecture_Halls_interior_view2_empty_class.jpg/512px-Curtis_Lecture_Halls_interior_view2_empty_class.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Curtis_Lecture_Halls_interior_view2_empty_class.jpg
Permission
By Theonlysilentbob (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
"I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free "