Student-Led Lecture as an Innovative Active Learning Approach in Large Cohorts Teaching: A Case Study

How to improve student learning outcomes especially in a large cohort is always a challenge. In this paper, we reported an initiative, called “Student-led Lecture”, to implement active learning in large classes with an aim to improve student independent learning skills. A 30-minute lecture was delivered by a student (first author) under the supervision of the module leader (corresponding author) to a cohort of 140 students in the Human Physiology module (Year 1) at one university in one academic year. Final exam marks at semester 2 as well as post-lecture and post-exam surveys were used to measure its impacts on learning outcomes. Our results showed that student-led Lecture can help to improve conceptual understanding, student motivation, exam preparation and performance. The independent learning skills explicitly explained in the lecture helped the cohort in their individual studies and had positive impacts on other modules too.

Therefore, we concluded that student-led Lecture as an innovative initiative can successfully implement active learning in large cohort class with a feasible delivery in an academic year, and importantly, it has potential in helping students to improve their independent learning skills.

Keywords:Student-led lecture (SLL); Active learning; Independent learning; Conceptual understanding; Large cohort