On the Future of Lecturing
By N. Monk, Futurist and Philosopher
In the future, lecturing will look quite different from what the world is used to now because of the further advancements that will be made in education. Continuously, new ways of teaching students are turning up. Before the recent pandemic, it was believed that classes would never be able to take place online after the pandemic the complete opposite was shown to be true. However, lectures being taught online are a mixed blessing.
There are plenty of technical advantages with online lecturing that do not currently exist with in-class lecturing. For example, in online classes, students have the option of captions in which for people who are hard of hearing or deaf this helps eliminate the difficulty of figuring out what the professor is saying. Another example is that in online lecture form because students and professors can use headphones to listen to the audio, the volume can be adjusted for people regardless of the hearing of the person. This too helps eliminate a problem with in-person lectures. More specifically, the students in the front rows right in front of the professors have the advantage of being able to hear more clearly what the speaker is saying, the further away one sits the more this decreases. Online lectures do not have this problem. Similarly, the people in the front rows have the advantages of being able to perfectly see everything that is written, like the sound this will decrease the further away one is. Once again online lectures eliminate this problem as well.
Online lectures are not what I believe will be the future of lecturing in general. One major problem with online lecturing is that the sound and audio quality depends on way too many factors. One has to consider webcam quality, microphone quality, internet download speeds, upload speeds, et cetera. For everyone in a class of 30+ or more to have all of these things to a reasonable standard is not a likely possibility at all, and even in the future, this may not be solved either. Physical lectures do not have these problems. From these examples, it becomes more apparent that a balance of virtual lecturing and in person lecturing is needed. This link may very well be with the use of holograms or three-dimensional holographic imagery.
The first thing one can note that will probably be different about the future lecture room is the seating and shape of the room. Ideally only one row in front or surrounding the speaker, so that the problems of decreasing sound and vision disappear. A circular arrangement of a desk or even a spherical arrangement of desks could be a strong possibility. Furthermore, to eliminate sound problems speakers could be imbedded in each desk and a good microphone placed on the speaker. Even so, if a student does not want to listen through the speaker on their desk, a headphone connection port could be placed in the desk as well and be used. This can be taken even further, a small lengthwise screen could be hidden in the desk and if the student chooses to have captions during the physical lecture the student can view the captions on the screen that pops up from in their desk. This is not all that can be done, for the lecturer, in the future interactive holograms could be a versatile tool. Let us say one is teaching about the solar system, with the use of holograms the lecturer could speak into the air and call upon a solar system hologram to aid instruction, as a bonus each of the solar system holograms can be manipulated by size, colour et cetera. A virtual assistant can also be present in each classroom to ask for all sorts of questions to the ever-growing database of knowledge to once again aid in the instruction of the lecturer. Because this lecture room is in person, the problems of online lecturing I outlined earlier also disappear. The only real problem with these lecture ideas is that they do not exist, but who is to say in fifty years or so it will not?