One of the challenges my department faces when providing professional education for adults is time.   The classes we teach (they are technical classes) are four and 5 day classes, all day, and we consistently get the complaint from students that they cannot afford to take work off for an extended period of time.  We’re consider a new approach to this problem.

Our classes in the past have followed the classic technical education model of modules that consist of a lecture, a demo, and then an activity to be completed by students.   Each module typically takes about an hour to complete.

There’s no question this is a “tried and true” method that engages students using a variety of different approaches, and is effective, but is this an efficient use of student time?   When we looked at students, and the activities, we realized that some students were completing the assignments quickly, while others were struggling, and took the fully allocated time.   This is to be expected given the differing skill levels and experience of students.

However, that left the students that finished quickly waiting for the next module to begin.   In a society where time is increasingly becoming equal to money, its important to evaluate whether or not this is the best way to deliver the material.

In a traditional classroom setting, its hard to break the old model, because the students are there, present, for a specified number of days, and while they may have the opportunity to “step out and place a call” while they are waiting, it really isn’t terribly productive in terms of their other work.

However in a virtual setting, we can break this model, and are considering it.    This concept came to me when I was taking a UC Irvine course on coursera, and there were 5 topics, and the lectures were pre-recorded, and the syllabus said “do the first topic, then do them in the order that interests you.”

In our case, our lectures aren’t recorded, and the order of materials is actually important, however we came up with another solution.

What if we, instead of following the model of:

Lecture, demo, activity, lecture, demo activity (repeat until the class is over) we did.

lecture, demo, lecture, demo, lecture, demo, activity activity activity.

In our particular case, there are roughly 20 modules, so we cover 4 modules a day using the old model.   Under the new model, it falls out as follows:

• Monday – Lectures and demos for modules 1-8
• Tuesday – Activities for modules 1-8
• Wednesday – Lectures and demos for modules 9-16
• Thursday – Activities for modules 9-16
• Friday – Lectures and Demos for modules 17-20 then activities for modules 17-20.

On Tuesday and Thursday, a conference call session would be open, but it would be for questions, rather than lecture and demo.   the instructor would be there to answer questions.   The student could proceed through the activities, and if they had a question, they could sign into the conference call, ask their question, get an answer, and move on.

For the students that don’t need assistance, and proceed quickly, we’ve freed up a lot of their time on Tuesday and Thursday to do work related tasks.   For students that are struggling, by the other students only being present during the lectures, and if they had a question, there would be more instructor time for the struggling student.

I’m not sure whether this is an effective model, but I do think it’s one worth testing to see if it work.s.