Didactic lectures are the mainstay of continuing education. “It’s how we’ve always done it.” It scales easier with a knowledge based program to structure teaching this way. On the other hand, teaching at scale and learning at scale do not have to be mutually exclusive. Perhaps they can happen at the same time.
This brings us to a two part series on the rate limiting steps (RLS) of continuing education: Didactic lectures and mandatory education.
From a chemical reaction or pathway standpoint, a rate limiting step is the slowest step in the process, which determines the overall rate of the process. It often can require the most energy to complete this step.
I would argue that creating a lecture is the most time consuming part of an educational program. If you also believe this step has the most impact on the overall goal of the pathway, it provides an opportunity to change the posture towards the importance of how a lecture is structured.
There’s a shift in education from teaching to students to teaching with students. In order to make this change, we also need to move away from purely didactic lectures and better incorporate hands-on, group interactive learning.
Stay tuned next week for the second part of our RLS series focusing on mandatory education.
Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash
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