The future of the traditional lecture is up for debate once more

Another idealist piece that ignores reality. In Engineering, where I am employed, there is a body of knowledge that has to be covered for professional accreditation purposes. If I do not know more than the students, they are wasting their time and money. It is the fashion to focus on project and group work but this is still towards ends that are firmly defined. It really goes without saying that students need to put in the hours outside lectures but it is also human nature to get the maximum return for the minimum effort.

"Universities should partner with students instead of treating them like passive recipients " Well that would be ideal- if they asked questions in class or were even keen to answer them, I would love that. I'm very keen to make students understand that education is not something I pour into their heads but a two-way collaboration. Alas, we also have to live in a real world and, sometimes, some of them want to be passive recipients of enough knowledge to get through the exams.

What strikes me about how things are now is how little information about how subjects are taught is available to prospective students (at least online). I work in a university in a supporting role and have been there for years, but am still sketchy about how the courses I support are actually taught. Across the sector information about courses are dominated by learning outcomes which are uninspiring, long winded and too abstract. It is nigh on impossible to work out what a typical week looks like or what the max size of the class would be. We could do with much more variety in the sector about how things are taught, and we should provide better (and possibly more standardised) information about teaching methods.