Why We Started This
“I don't think I can ever go back.”
TL;DR
One moment, Dominik sounds like he is reciting a fact from one of his lectures. The next, his words become a tangible truth that he hadn’t touched on before. “Standing in a lecture hall and just reciting slides for 90 minutes.” He chuckles. “It’s not really possible anymore. It’s a one-way street.” There’s a silence on the other end of the phone, joining mine. A thoughtful silence.
Like many professors, Dominik created videos to teach his students during the Covid-19 pandemic. But when classes resumed at the university, he made the choice not to return to PowerPoint slides and monologues in front of a class of students who rarely asked questions. Instead, he continued to provide the online content, which left him with an opportunity: To use the 90 minutes of lecture time for something other than reciting slides.
Something new.
It started slowly. Slow by his current standards, that is. There was one big change right from the start: No more slides! Instead, Dominik’s lectures were filled with quizzes, Kahoot games, riddles, discussions and Q&A sessions. Something he now describes as a safety net when he runs out of ideas, but “rather boring.”
“It lacks that character of inspiration,” he says. “It’s not something where you say afterwards, oh great, luckily there’s another lecture like that next week.”
So he changed things once again.
“The plan for this term was to try it out and get a feel for whether it was worth spending more time on. If it was something that was fun.”
And he did try. A lot. From a Jeopardy, to a Christmas story, to a non-linear fiction story about a day in the life of an IT security analyst. He has redefined what a lecture can be in ways that seem extreme from the outside, but simply provide information in different contexts to give students a new perspective. Along with a healthy dose of entertainment.
As professors, it is our job to make attending lectures worthwhile.
“I would maintain that you don’t need to come to the classroom, not at all, if you can force yourself to watch the videos, understand and work through what is said there, and do the exercises,” Dominik says. Unfortunately, this does not happen. It is the students who show up for the lectures who truly benefit from the course. Thus, Dominik’s simple goal is to “make it worthwhile to attend the lecture.” By interweaving entertainment and information.
But is it worth it?
I ask him what he thinks.
“It’s like laughing with tears in your eyes. It takes ages to prepare.”
And then there was this one feedback from the course evaluation. “One student said that it seemed as if the lecture was being held for the sole purpose of the lecturer’s enjoyment.”
“I thought about that.” Dominik pauses. “And I don’t think that’s true.”
Silence.
Part of it is. Dominik wouldn’t be doing any of this if it wasn’t fun - “so incredibly much more fun” - and if he wasn’t getting something out of it. He likes that “sometimes things become clearer to me during the lecture. If I feel like I’m the tape recorder that you just switch on and stop after 90 minutes, that doesn’t help me at all.”
So he takes the time to invent new lecture formats and puts himself in an exam-like position, facing the students’ questions in every lecture and perhaps not knowing the answer to everything. It is exhausting. And risky. He worries that even these lectures might become routine eventually.
What about your teaching?
When did you last feel genuinely excited about delivering a lecture? What made that experience fulfilling, and how might you recreate that energy? What value do your in-person classes provide? How can you make your classroom time worth attending? Why not risk failure for the chance to truly inspire? What small experiment could you try in your next class?
And yet.
“To see the light in my students’ eyes when something unexpected happens or when they learn something new … that’s priceless.”
PowerPoint slides had become boring for Dominik even before the pandemic provided an opportunity for change. “It was only really fun in the first semester, when they were new, because I often didn’t know what was going to happen next.” With routine comes boredom. With boredom, the quality of the lecture deteriorates while “you feel like you just have to get through it somehow.”
So yes, part of it is true. Dominik wants to have fun when he gives a lecture. But there is another incentive underneath it.
“Maybe my science will change the world, maybe it won’t,” says Dominik. “But if I inspire students and they go out into the world and change things, then I can have a real impact.”
This time, there is no silence.
“How does that feel?”, he repeats. “It feels amazing.”
I finish the conversation thinking that, actually, more lecturers should prioritise having fun.
Perhaps the collection of lecture innovations on this page can be an inspiration to start.