An Opinion on the Significance of the Oral Lecture

Abstract

Recently, course lectures have been divided up into many pieces given by different lecturers with narrower but deeper knowledge. This is in contrast to the older style of all lectures in a course being delivered by a single lecturer. The lectures today are thus overflowing with too much content for students to handle. As a result, oral lectures have lost popularity as educational tools, since their utility is diminished by information overload. The original function of the oral lecture as a method of transmitting knowledge should be reinstated, with the strong support of various educational materials and computers.