Ethnographic Studies

For our ethnographic studies of lecture conditions, we employed methods of non-invasive observation and interviews of the students.

Observations:
Our group (Junhao, Jialin & Yi Eng) chose to focus on the CS3253 Management of IS lecture in LT34 as it simply highlights most, if not, all the problems we found in the other lectures we have crashed.

The lecture was held at 10am in the morning, supposedly a good timing for students to concentrate and absorb information. It started a bit late as the lecturer had a slight problem with the projector; the projected image kept appearing and disappearing for no obvious reasons. The glitch went on throughout the whole lecture, creating a major distraction for the students as well as the lecturer.

The lecturer was rather monotonous with her lecturing, causing a few of the students to “fly off” to other planetary systems. The situation was particularly bad at the back, where students started chatting amongst themselves. The chatter began to get a bit unbearable, but the lecturer just carried on with her lecture, seemingly unaware of the unrest behind. It was already 30 minutes into the lecture, but students were still streaming into the lecture theatre; again, causing minor distractions to the already monotonous lecture. The restlessness of the students began to show more clearly as more shuffling in the seats could be heard through the entire lecture theatre.

1 hour into the lecture, and still no break was given by the lecturer. By this time, the students have really gotten restless. The attention span of the students began to fade as more and more of them started doing their own things instead of listening to the lecturer. Some started eating and drinking, talking, smsing on the phone, doing stuff on their laptops while others just started looking around aimlessly. Finally at 1 hour and 15 minutes into the lecture, the lecturer decided to give a break; much to the relief of the students.

It is also interesting to note that in most lectures, when the lecturers pose questions to the floor, almost nobody will respond or attempt to answer immediately. There will be a dead silence for 30 plus seconds before anyone speaks up, or rather, the lecturer decides to answer his or her own question. Student interactivity with the lecturer was pretty limited in large lecture theatre environments but in seminar classes, the students were more willing to speak up.

Possible Problems:
Perhaps the lecture was held a bit early in the morning and coupled with the monotonous tone of the lecturer, the students were “lullabied” off to dreamland. The boredom was unbearable especially after an hour into the lecture. There was also not much participation from the students, which resulted in a “one-way” traffic situation where only the lecturer was talking. This seemingly created a type of “disconnectedness” between the students and the lectured topic. Attention spans of students should be taken into consideration too; it appeared that an hour and 15 minutes was a bit too long for the students to maintain their attention to the lecture.

Possible solutions:
Some of the possible solutions that our group has come up with are as follows; there should be a break given to the students near the one hour mark. The lecturer should try to initiate discussions with the students rather than simply throwing them a question and wait for their response. Maybe small goodies can be given to students who participate in the discussions. (This was done by Dr Perry during her media writing lectures to encourage participations) Presentation slides should not contain a lot of words as this would be a major distraction for the students as the lecturer tries to explain certain concepts. Maybe the lecture notes should come with blanks whereby the students would have to pay close attention to the lecture, lest they choose to risk missing the important points.

Classmate’s presentation:
I found the Feng Shui presentation to be quite an interesting one; adding another facet to observational studies. I didn’t know that NUS was actually constructed according to Feng Shui readings as interesting as the one mentioned by Zhonghao’s group. There are a lot of ways or methods we can employ to read or study environments so as to make improvements to better the current methods. I believe that variety is the way to go for today’s modern world.