No longer tuned in to master's voice

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Online digital environments are inviting all of us to reject the role of spectatorship and to participate actively in our own learning write Erica McWilliam and Norman Jackson

GO to almost any Australian university campus and you will find at least one big lecture theatre. Whether built last year or a century ago, lecture theatres have a predictable design: hundreds of tiered seats arranged so that hundreds of students can be focused fairly and squarely on a singular podium where a singular figure - a lecturer - gives a lecture.

We continue to insist on the term lecturer as the appropriate professional title for an academic below the rank of professor or associate professor. Lectures, like sermons, were once part and parcel of a society in which elites were in the know and the great unwashed were presumed ignorant. Students, as seekers after knowledge, sat at the feet, literally and metaphorically, of the great man.

Feet-sitting is not the predilection of 21st-century students. Whether we call them gen C, gen Y or gen Z, the net generation, millennials, digital natives, the online generation or the gamer generation, today's young people have multiple ways of informing themselves, and being lectured to is unlikely to be high on their list of preferences.

According to a recent US research study, young gamers do not tolerate front-end instruction. They jump over instruction manuals, learning to use a meta-map or to operate without one, rather than learning from instruction from outside the subculture. Hands-on trial and error is the dominant learning mode.

Not all university students are gamers and many are not young. However, there is a message here that is bringing content delivery through lecturing into collision with the learning preferences of today's students.

Online digital environments are inviting all of us to reject the role of spectatorship and to participate actively in our own learning.

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