001 - What is the purpose of this lecture?

This is a new endeavor for me. My objective is to simply to improve lectures. I will give you my thoughts and introduce you to some interesting thoughts and studies from others. My background is education, specifically medical education. I teach students and residents during their medical training. Between these teaching sessions and the thousands of lectures I have attended, I believe that this system of teaching can be improved dramatically.

So, that is my objective (to help others improve the quality of their lectures). How often do you know the objectives of the lecturers you encounter. I will acknowledge that it is common to see a slide towards the beginning of the presentation that says "Objectives." Usually this slide is completely wrong from a pedagogic standpoint. Here is an example from a set of slides that were emailed to me by the American Heart Association. I have nothing at all against the AHA, it just happens to be the example that crossed my desk today. Here is slide #2 from a lecture called "The Future of Cardiovascular Disease: Heart Failure".

Objectives:

• Review epidemiology of heart failure
• Elderly
• Briefly review therapeutic advances
• Discuss major shortcomings in diagnosis and management of heart failure
• Future research directions

Pretty standard, huh? The problem is that this is the agenda. The speakers objective is to talk about these things. In educational terms, objectives are what the student will be able to accomplish as a result of the lecture. This is an oversimplified definition, but here is the difference:

Agenda:

• Briefly review therapeutic advances
• Discuss major shortcomings in diagnosis and management of heart failure

Objectives: (the learner will be able to)

• Describe the 3 most important therapeutic advances in heart failure treatment and the indication for use of each.
• Know the 3 most common errors in diagnosis and management of heart failure and how to avoid them.

Look at how the next lecturer you encounter introduces his talk. Are his introduction or objectives merely an agenda? In later posts I will show you the importance of an agenda and several ways this can be used to make lecturers easier to follow. I will also talk about the importance of having clear objectives. These 2 things go hand-in-hand as you will see.