The lecture’s funeral was premature

14 July 2026

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to present my work at the Advance HE Teaching and Learning conference in Sheffield, thanks to the SBBS funding for Scholarship. 

The conference theme was “success by design: the future of learning now” and I responded to the call for provocations within the sub-theme of “excellence in action” by arguing “the lecture’s funeral was premature”. 

My presentation was based on research I’ve conducted in recent years, exploring students’ opinions on what we do in our taught sessions.  From interviewing 23 students one thing that stood out to me was just how much students appreciate staff standing in front of them and talking to them, explaining our subject, and going through material that they could have read in a textbook or in a paper. 

Of course, this comes with caveats. 

The first caveat it that the material has to be carefully structured, so that it relates back to previous learning, and that concepts in the lecture build on each other. 

The second caveat is that students don’t want the whole two-hour session to be didactic.  Instead, they want lectures to be blocks of explanation, interleaved with opportunities to ask and answer questions, and use the explained material in some way. 

The talk was well-received and gave rise to some interesting conversations afterwards. 

One thing I always appreciate about going to conferences is having the opportunity to step back from everyday life and gain fresh perspective – being able to see the wood for the trees.  Consequently I particularly benefitted from the panel discussion on “excellence in action in pedagogic practice”.  The discussion took things right back to basics of thinking about education design, being purposeful in integrating new technology and evaluating teaching excellence, and whether pedagogical excellence will look different in 10 years’ time.  The panel spoke about an intentionality which can become lost when you’re embroiled in the day-to-day of semester life. 

I came away from the conference with a renewed sense of starting from the basics as a foundation and building up from there. 

-Jayne Dennis 
Reader in Biomedical Education, Director of Scholarship

Biomedical Sciences