Abstract
In the last two decades, North American post-secondary institutions have seen a precipitous drop in humanities enrolments at the undergraduate level. Regarded as abstruse, dry and essentially irrelevant to students’ day-to-day existence, the humanities have been marginalized as merely an academic extravagance, to be engaged with only in passing, if at all. Cognizant that our students have grown up in the internet, smartphone and YouTube age, I have developed a pedagogical method that aligns with their increasingly audio-visual way of learning and concomitantly demonstrates that the humanities do indeed occupy a prominent place in their lives. “Augmented Lecturing” functions through pairing conventional speech with sensory stimuli: relatively brief audio-visual excerpts, curated to target lecture points. All extraneous material is edited out of the original video and audio (through, e.g., iMovie) and excerpts are then embedded within the presentation program (e.g., PowerPoint). Pauses in the shift between verbal and audio-visual modalities are eliminated. Modalities amplify and reinforce each other in a framework that continually links sensory stimuli to course material in order to activate areas of the brain that enhance learning and memory. As part of a study funded by my university, I ran a survey last year in four of my classes to measure the efficacy of Augmented Lecturing on student engagement, motivation and memory. There was a 60-percent response rate, with the positivity score on every question ranging from 80 to 95 percent. Augmented Lecturing allows me to show students that the humanities are all around us. They matter.
Presenters
Daniel MillerAssociate Professor and Chair, Dept. of Religion, Society and Culture, Bishop's University, Quebec, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Technology, Innovation, Knowledge Mobilization, Learning, Memory, Engagement
