So I thought, why not throw another youtube video in? Actually, this one’s really interesting because the students are talking about lectures and seminars and what they are like. It’s from the University of Birmingham. Quiz question: which speaker has the strong Birmingham accent?!
(If you can’t see youtube videos try here and you’ll find other youtube clips too.)
My course is Social Policy and it’s taught through seminars and lectures, lectures are where you just listen to lots of information and I have about 8 – 9 contact hours with that and then I also have seminars which are a chance to discuss or dissertation meetings which is a chance to have one to one contact time with your tutor and they help you out with any problems you may have.
I do Chemical Engineering and the course comprises about 20+ hours of lectures per week including laboratories and tutorial sessions as well. The structure is basically where you go to lectures and take down notes and the tutorial sessions are sessions where you can ask questions about specific parts of the lecture you don’t understand, or parts of the course that you’ve been taught but don’t necessarily understand either. You also have a personal tutor who you meet with like I think about twice a term and you have an opportunity to speak to them about any problems that you’re having with the course, you know any material you may not understand, you can actually go to your personal tutor, you can talk with them about anything that you’re finding a bit difficult.
My course because I do Mathematics and Psychology with 2/3 Maths it’s mainly lectures and example classes, so I have about 13 hours of lectures a week, two hours of computer lab where you just use Mathematics and computer software and about 3 to 4 hours of example classes where you just talk about problems with postgrads if you’ve got problems with your work and you have to hand in exercises and things like that.
My Chemistry course is taught with mostly labs we’ve got about a day and half of labs and about 20 hours a week of lectures. During the course of the year as well we also have tutorials which are smaller group sessions where we talk to the tutors and we get to talk about the course content, we get to ask any questions on a one – to – one basis we just get to interact more with the other students as well.
My course is taught with lectures and labs mainly we don’t have many seminars or tutorials –I mean they are in the timetables so if you need any of help with any of the theory you can go and sit in and get extra help from PhD students or the course teachers. At the beginning of term we have about 14 contact hours where we have a lot of lectures and we go through theory, through the slides and we have reports for that, course work.
The way you’re taught at university is quite different from sixth form and colleges and things like that because you basically have a few lectures but you also have seminars and lectures are usually your whole course, meeting up and just receiving information from one of the lecturers on a particular topic and a seminar is where you meet in small groups and you have to kind of discuss the range of ideas you heard about in your lecture and you go through things in more detail, so you get a better idea of what the course is about.
At university your timetable consists of a mixture of lectures and small group teachings which are also known as seminars. Depending on your course the number of people in your lectures may vary. For my course we have about 400 people in a big lecture theatre. In small group seminars again depending on your department it varies between ten people to about 20.