Where did the lectures go?
Outcomes
An engaged critical model, such as that encouraged by Stella Cottrell in Critical Thinking Skills, enables students to take on board and to evaluate someone else’ s thinking. Students will develop skills that enable them to locate the main arguments in complex texts and to judge whether those arguments are supported by good evidence. They will learn to distinguish a valid argument that is evidence-based from an unsupported claim or assumption. And they will learn to engage with and evaluate the evidence from alternative points of view and weigh up evidence for opposing arguments fairly.
They will also learn to criticise and evaluate their own thinking, to examine their own ideas and assumptions, retaining only those that are evidence-based, and to mount an argument to support those ideas in a structured, well-argued way.
Without the skills required to engage critically and analytically with new material... Irish students will continue to experience difficulty with the demands of third-level learning.
Without the skills required to engage critically and analytically with new material, to draw conclusions as to the validity and / or value of that material, and to present those conclusions clearly and convincingly, Irish students will continue to experience difficulty with the demands of third-level learning.
Where did the lectures go?
Lectures— the core material that the student will need to participate in the course— can be made available online in an audio-visual format and remain online from the week they are assigned until the end of the course. In this way, the student can watch at a time that suits them and as often as they like thereafter. If at a later date, students are struggling with a part of the material, they can go back to the lecture and go over it themselves. There is consequently no need to memorise or take notes; revision is no longer an attempt to decipher scribbled notes, but a return to the full lecture. Freed from the pressure of memorising or memorialising, the student can engage with the material contained in the lecture and bring that engagement into the classroom, ready for discussion.
Outcomes
The practice of dialogic exchange, critical analysis, and evaluation constructs not a checklist of factoids to be digested and regurgitated at a later date, but a deep understanding and a simultaneous radical critique of the subject being studied.
They will learn to read between the lines, see behind surfaces, and identify false or unfair assumptions. They will consequently produce better critical analyses of new material— or exam questions.