The Facade of Classrooms: Perspectives on the nature of lectures in the institute

Credits: Leisha, Aarav, Vedant 
Mentor: Khushi

THE FACADE OF CLASSROOMS 

LECTURES?

“Who attends AB XXX lectures? I got the same marks as the student who attended all the lectures.”

Absenteeism is usually associated with low-performing students, so seeing it normalised within the campus subverts expectations. It is often dismissed as a sign of student immaturity; however, conversations with students paint a different picture.

“I just stopped attending because they [lectures] didn’t fulfill my needs.”

This sentiment raises a larger question: What is the real benefit of sitting through a lecture? It can’t just be about learning the course material, because students can use notes, textbooks, and YouTube videos to study the same content. Lectures provide a platform for interacting with professors who possess in-depth knowledge of the subject and for engaging with their peers. It makes it easier to get their doubts clarified and go beyond the words in a textbook. 

However, several students find lectures to be boring and monotonous and feel that lectures are not a productive use of their time.   

HOW AND WHY?

To understand why lectures sometimes fail to deliver their intended impact, it is helpful to examine the structural issues first. The lecture halls at the institute, particularly the LAs can sometimes accommodate up to 350 students, and for some courses, this is an issue. Professors are tasked with conveying high-level ideas in a clear and understandable manner. However, when class strength is high, it is not feasible for them to gauge the students’ understanding and pace the course delivery accordingly.

This makes it harder for a large number of students to follow the course. The issue is exacerbated by the classroom’s physical dimensions, which make it more difficult for the backbenchers to see or hear the professor clearly. In addition, students sometimes hesitate to ask questions out of fear of being judged or ridiculed, leaving them disconnected from what it essentially means to connect the dots for them.

The gap in understanding is worsened if the concerned professors themselves invest less time and effort into teaching. This tendency may be an outcome of research work being institutionally more incentivised than teaching. Research papers, citations, and grants are not only financially beneficial, but they are also symbols of prestige for the professor and the institute. According to the IIT Bombay faculty handbook, professors are expected to devote more time to research than to teaching, illustrating how institutional priorities influence the quality of instruction.

On the other hand, some professors mean to teach well but may not be sufficiently equipped with pedagogical techniques. This means that lectures often become recitations or slide presentations, rather than interactive discussions. Still, some professors invest significant efforts, trying to make classes more interactive, engaging, and beneficial for the students. 

Student attitude and enthusiasm add another layer to this already complex problem. Their personal perspectives influence how interesting and engaging specific courses appear to them. For several students, their choice of branch or the decision to pursue engineering is driven by the prospect of placements, market trends, and future opportunities, rather than a genuine interest in the subject itself. As a result, the students lack an innate curiosity for the course content.

Furthermore, it’s natural to find that battle-hardened, having endured two years of intense JEE preparation, the students have developed a results-centric approach. Hence, on noticing that their grades and attendance do not correlate, students are dissuaded from prioritising the latter. This mindset is further cemented when they observe their peers doing the same. Their disinterest and neglect mean classes become monotonous, which in turn reinforces the disinterest. Missing classes does not affect them because it’s more convenient to study in the days leading up to the exam and get by.

All of the aforementioned factors slowly weaken what should have been a healthy academic relationship, resulting in a transactional nature, wherein lectures feel like a formality for both students and professors. Enthusiastic engagements within a lecture foster genuine student-teacher relationships. When such a relationship exists, students seek validation from their professors. This prompts them to invest time and effort into their regular coursework. The need for validation serves as a precursor to establishing accountability.

When the professor is unable to hold students accountable, it’s easier for the latter to not prioritise their coursework and get away with it. This enforces a cycle where students become complacent and develop indifference towards the course. While they may still feel responsible when it comes to grades, ignoring regular classwork means they won’t be able to engage productively in discussions and challenge themselves to think beyond what is being taught inside the classrooms. To this effect, their courses are just reduced to examinations.

WHAT NOW? 

With these problems in mind, it’s worth examining the fixes the institute has attempted. These inherent issues don’t come with straightforward solutions. A nuanced approach is needed to ensure that the benefit is experienced to the maximum effect, without any obvious caveats. 

ARE TAs THE ANSWER?

The system introduces teaching assistants (TAs) as a way to help manage large class sizes by checking assignments and exams, conducting tutorial sessions and helping students gain a thorough understanding of concepts. However, TAs are not a direct replacement for professors; they are not expected to match the knowledge and intuition a professor possesses. TAs can only act as intermediaries between students and the professor by relaying student questions, confusion, or feedback to the professor, especially when students feel hesitant to approach the professor directly. Nonetheless, they are still relied on heavily to provide answers to student doubts and reinforce the learning imparted during lectures. 

When the professor is inaccessible to students, they become the main point of contact for guidance and clarification. However, Teaching Assistants aren’t always up for the job. Some of them struggle with effective communication. The mandatory TA training course, TA101, is an online, unsupervised course and fails to provide sufficient pedagogical training for the role. In addition, TAs are sometimes unfamiliar with the course content they are expected to teach. There have been incidents where they have been unable to explain basic concepts.

While it is unreasonable to expect them to know everything about a topic, a basic level of competency should be expected. The concern is not just regarding their ability, but rather the negligence that sometimes stems from their motivation behind taking up the role. In scenarios where it is voluntary, students may opt for the responsibility of being a TA, driven by the opportunity to earn a stipend or strengthen their resumes, as opposed to a genuine interest in teaching. 

Student performance is adversely affected, as not only do the students’ doubts go unresolved, but they find themselves amidst more confusion. 

IS REGULARITY THE KEY? 

The institute has implemented various policies to ensure regular student attendance, including a strict attendance policy and regular quizzes. Attendance policies may not help improve the quality of classroom interaction; the students can be mentally absent even when they physically attend classes. The policies also implicitly point toward the underlying problem, where the classes themselves can’t hold the students’ attention, and the institute has to resort to such measures.

While regular quizzes and assessments are conducted to foster regularity among students, they actually increase students’ frustrations when tied to the current situation. Students can’t rely on lectures to understand the material, leaving them to handle most of the learning while the monotonous and boring nature of lectures remains unaddressed. These solutions are superficial and may improve student attendance, but they worsen the already adverse perception that students have about lectures. 

IS THE CRITICISM CONSTRUCTIVE ENOUGH? 

Another approach to improving the quality of instruction is to incorporate student opinions to identify and address any shortcomings that may be negatively impacting their experience. ASC feedback is used to identify problems the system hasn’t solved or is unaware of. However, the questions asked are sometimes not specific in nature, leading to even more vague responses that do not articulate the students’ perspective effectively. 

WHAT DOES THE OVERALL PICTURE SAY?

Administrative, not just pedagogical, shortcomings, along with a student mentality that lacks curiosity, have created a system that perpetually rewards the wrong things. The campus is unable to foster curiosity, and if the students end up studying solely for grades, then it’s a waste of time. 

The need of the hour is to develop policies and introduce measures that focus on improving the classroom environment through the implementation of innovative teaching methods by professors, such as group-based activities, gamification, and project-based learning. Good teaching practices can also be incentivised through recognition in the form of awards given on a more frequent basis. Guest lectures from industry professionals or researchers in similar areas will also contribute to fostering students’ curiosity. At the same time, the training of TAs can be made more rigorous and may include some hands-on phases, rather than being entirely online. 

If the students don’t understand what they were taught, they cannot question it, and if they don’t question, then they definitely cannot innovate.​