The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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12:19pm on Thursday, 28th October, 2021:
Anecdote
My lectures are nominally two hours long. They're actually limited to being an hour and fifty minutes long, because we have to evacuate teaching rooms ten minutes before the next lecture starts so that our students can get to their next lecture in time (should they choose to attend it) and so that the students of the next lecturer to use the room can sit in the exact same seat they've inexplicably sat in for all the previous lectures for that module and eat smelly food.
I sus[ect that I may be supposed to have a ten-minute break in the middle of my lectures, too, making an hour worth fifty minutes. I rarely do have such breaks, though, because if you tell students they can go for ten minutes then inevitably some won't come back until fifteen or twenty minutes have elapsed.
Last year, I had to rewrite all my classes as lectures, because I couldn't hold them as classes. All of them were pre-recorded for students to watch at their leisure. Because of this, I wasn't limited to delivering them in an hour and fifty minutes: they could take their natural length, without my having to speed through the final fifteen slides in ten minutes.
This means I can look at the running times of the lectures and see what their natural length is, to measure how much content they have in them.
For CE317, I had eighteen lectures, one lab and one lecture I didn't pre-record. The pre-recorded lectures lasted the following number of minutes: 111, 117, 104, 118, 117, 94, 137, 117, 106, 106, 152, 83, 157, 123, 166, 102, 145, 94. This comes out at an average of 119 minutes, or just under the two hours that the lectures should nominally take.
This is pretty good, except that there's a standard deviation of 23½ minutes. The shortest lecture is an hour and twenty-three minutes; the longest lecture is two hours and forty-six minutes. Spinning out the short ones and whizzing through the long ones is not ideal. Unfortunately, they're topic-based, so taking fifty minutes of material from the lecture on Virtual Worlds and the Law and adding it to the reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight isn't viable.
I really ought to remove some content entirely from the over-long lectures and expand the content of the over-short lectures. However, when I undertake my annual lecture-revision exercise (which is what I'm doing at the moment), I tend to think of many more things that I want to add rather than identify what I have that I can safely remove. This is great for the too-short lectures but less than great for the too-long lectures.
Fortunately, the knowledge that the more material I present, the more work I have to do, is sufficient to override any compunctions I might have about killing any of it off.
Another victory for laziness!
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Copyright © 2021 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).