I’ve had the pleasure of attending some truly fantastic lectures at Kent, sessions where you could feel the energy in the room, where ideas sparked and stuck. But I’ve also seen how easily the lecture format can slip into something more passive. It’s easy to feel a sense of accomplishment after delivering a packed session: you’ve covered the key content, shared your slides, and maybe even thrown in a few examples. But while we may have taught, that doesn’t always mean students have learned.
The lecture format can create an illusion of progress, content delivered, box ticked, while leaving students struggling to make sense of it all. And when students sit silently for 50 minutes, scribbling notes or zoning out, it’s no surprise that understanding doesn’t always follow just being talked through the material.
What Are Students Actually Doing During a Lecture?
In too many cases, lectures are something that happen to students rather than something they actively engage in. That matters because what students are doing during a session has a huge impact on how well they learn.
We’ve all seen it: students frantically copying slides, trying to keep up with a rapid flow of information. Others might be multitasking, checking emails, or simply checking out. And I’ll be honest, I’ve done it too. I’ve sat in lectures, scribbling notes without really processing them, hoping it would all make sense later. Even the most motivated student can struggle to retain and apply material if they’re not given time and space to think, ask, test, and reflect.
I often hear academics talk about students turning up to lectures but seeming disengaged, heads down, phones out, barely making eye contact. But we should be careful not to jump to conclusions. Just because a student doesn’t look engaged doesn’t mean they aren’t learning.
I recently heard about a case where a student sat through a lecture with their head buried in their laptop. The lecturer assumed they were browsing the internet and not paying attention. Later, they discovered the student had been actively engaging with the material, using AI to ask questions, clarify ideas, and explore related topics in real time. They weren’t tuned out; they were learning in a way that worked for them.
And that’s the key: learning isn’t just about listening, it’s about processing. Whether students are reflecting, questioning, researching, or discussing, they need regular opportunities to interact with the material. Without that space to pause, retrieve, or apply what they’re hearing, even the most well-structured lecture can become overwhelming.
Live Doesn’t Have to Mean Passive
This doesn’t mean we should abandon lectures altogether. A well-designed lecture can still be a powerful tool, especially when it’s structured around moments of active engagement.
You don’t need to overhaul your teaching to make a big difference. Here are a few scalable, low-tech ways to make lectures more interactive without needing anything beyond what students already have with them:
- Use live polling tools like Vevox to test understanding, spark discussion, or surface different viewpoints in real time.
- “What happens next?” Show a diagram, animation, or scenario, then pause and ask students to predict what comes next. This works well with processes, code, case studies, or even quotations.
- “Odd one out” challenges: Present a set of items (e.g. terms, equations, images) and ask which one doesn’t belong and why. There might be more than one valid answer, which encourages reasoning and discussion.
- Sequencing tasks: Give students a scrambled list of steps or concepts and ask them to put them in the correct order—either mentally, via paper, or using Vevox’s ranking question type.
- “This is the answer—what’s the question?” Present a number, term, or outcome and ask students to generate possible questions that match it. Great for getting students thinking conceptually.
- Quick reflection tasks: Ask students to jot down the most confusing idea so far, or one thing they’ve learned. You can collect responses anonymously through a poll or just use this as a quiet moment to reset.
- Gallery walk (space permitting): Set up stations or posters around the room with different questions, examples, or problems. Students rotate in small groups, adding responses or building on others’ ideas. It works well—but may not be feasible in more traditional or tightly packed lecture theatres.
If you’re looking for more inspiration on how to make sessions playful, memorable, and meaningful, I highly recommend this talk by Dr Alex Borman on Learning Through Play. In it, he shares creative examples, from quiz-show formats to game-inspired prompts, that help make learning more active and enjoyable.
These approaches work because they ask students to do something with the content, whether that’s predicting, ranking, discussing, or applying, rather than just receiving it. And because they’re simple and scalable, they can be embedded into any lecture format.
If They Can Watch It Later, Why Come at All?
As lecture capture becomes the norm, students increasingly ask: “Why attend live if I can watch it at 1.5x later, or just use AI to summarise it for me?”
It’s a fair question. If a lecture is just a spoken version of the slides, with no interaction, limited flexibility, and little added value beyond what’s already online, why not save the commute?
The answer isn’t to remove recordings, it’s to reimagine what live teaching is for. Students show up when they know something valuable will happen in the room: when they’ll have a chance to engage, to ask questions, to make sense of complex ideas together.
In my previous blog on asynchronous learning, I talked about the importance of designing learning experiences students won’t want to outsource to AI or skip entirely. The same principle applies here. If students can get the same outcome from a chatbot or a recording, we need to ask: What’s the added value of showing up live? And how can we design for that?
Designing with Purpose: What Should Students Do in a Lecture?
When planning a lecture, it can be tempting to focus on covering content: “What do I need to get through in this session?” But a more useful starting point might be:
“What do I want students to learn and how will the session help them do that?”
It’s a subtle shift but a powerful one. It encourages us to think about the lecture not as a performance but as a structured learning experience, one in which the student’s role is more than just listening.
That might mean using part of a lecture for group discussion, problem-solving, or structured note-taking. It might mean flipping part of the content so students arrive having already explored the basics. It might even mean rethinking whether a traditional lecture is the right format at all for that particular topic.
Final Thoughts: Less Is More
Some of the best lectures I’ve seen weren’t the ones packed with the most slides, they were the ones where the lecturer slowed down, focused on a few key ideas, and gave students space to engage.
As we continue to evolve our teaching, especially in the shift towards more active, blended, and student-centred learning, it’s worth asking whether our lectures are doing what we hope they’re doing. Are they helping students understand, apply, and retain what matters most? Or are we falling into the trap of saying more and achieving less?
The lecture isn’t broken, but it does need a rethink. Let’s make every session count.