No more lectures: you are all adult learners now

No more lectures: you are all adult learners now

This case study describes the learning experience of a team of academics in a business faculty as they embarked on an odyssey of teaching innovation. This innovation essentially dispensed with the standard 'one lecture, one tutorial per week, every week, for twelve weeks' format which had always been used to teach a foundation business subject Organisational Behaviour and Management. From this point of view we were doing it differently. It was based on an underlying philosophy of independent adult learning, in which students took responsibility for their own learning. This included their own reading program, rather than having the text book 'spoon fed' to them in weekly lectures, as well as a desire to add value to our face-to-face teaching, that is, 'to do it better'. This project is now in its third year of implementation and, somewhat paradoxically in some aspects, the teaching format has reverted to an even more 'lock-step' structured approach than was originally the case in the traditional offering of the subject. Surprisingly, this was more due to resistance to change from students rather than staff.
This case study first reviews some of the literature relating to two competing views of the learning process. The two views of knowledge development are empiricism, or objectivism, and the more current constructivism. This review is done to highlight the theoretical basis for differences between traditional (talk and chalk) style university teaching, and the newer principles of independent learning that informed the teaching innovations discussed here.

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