Alternative title: Technology and the battle for student's attention in lectures.

Topic

Students digital devices in lectures - complementary backchannel or powerful distraction? How do we know?

Almost all UCL students own an internet-enabled device, and we increasingly take these for granted. However, without active management, lecturers can find themselves competing for attention as students multitask. Responses to this phenomenon vary. At the most laissez-fair pole are appeals to students' adulthood, agency and personal responsibility, while at the most authoritarian pole are outright bans on devices. This session will begin by reviewing and discussing the most influential thought pieces on different sides of the argument about the role of students' digital devices in lectures. We will introduce research findings about the effects of social media use in lectures has on learning. Next we will consider contrasting approaches lecturers have adopted to gain and keep students' attention, and discuss their relative merits. For the majority of the session we will consider strategies for large group sessions, particularly those which raise students awareness of how they learn, and put students' own devices to work for educational purposes. Inevitably, this session will challenge the role of lecture for content delivery.

Learning outcomes

This session will give you an understanding of the impact of students own devices on their engagement with your large group session (K3). You will gain some strategies for creating an effective learning environment (A4) which include students' own devices for your educational purposes (A1). You will gain some ideas for large group activities (K2, K4) which incorporate students' own devices as well as including students who do not have access to a device (V2).

Browser not supported