Quectures: Personalised constructive learning in lectures

Abstract

Active learning exercises engage students during lectures, but often fail to take account of the individual learning position of each student. The ‘quecture’ is a partially flipped lecture that incorporates students posing their own questions (quecture questions), discussing them during lectures and revisiting them later. These interactive learning events are designed to personalise students’ construction of learning during lectures. Quectures were trialled in direct comparison with both fully flipped and traditional lectures, providing information on student attitudes, experiences and engagement with the learning strategy. Quectures were favoured by participants over the two other lecture formats and were found to be helpful both in increasing learning and in improving study habits, although some students had difficulty adjusting to, or disliked, the new mode of learning. The student-posed questions were also perceived by students to improve enquiry skills and to personalise learning. Although many chose not to engage with the strategy, those who did felt more engaged with, and more responsible for their own learning during quectures than in traditional lectures. Future work will be required to generalise the effectiveness of this strategy as well as to fine tune for optimum benefit. It will also be important to investigate which subpopulations of students preferentially engage or disengage with the strategy, and to unpick any relationship between this engagement and academic performance.