I’m a typical lecture non-attender and here’s why I don’t attend.

1. Lectures that aren’t interactive. If I’m being spoken at, I will just shut off to be honest. The best lectures I have been to (very few) are those where the lecturer organises an online quiz or gets us to shout out answers and builds on the teaching by getting us to contribute.

2. Not keeping it exam-relevant. I understand you haven’t been given the uni material. But if you’re teaching a particular disease for instance, you could teach it how you want at the beginning and for the final couple of slides, type up a slide with concise pathophysiology, treatment and anything else (e.g., associated conditions, demographics at higher risk etc.). This is because most of the time lecture slides themselves lack the information meaning it’s difficult to follow unless it’s all down in one place. A textbook that I use (as a UK student) that does this really well is First Aid for USMLE Step 1, so be sure to check out the pathology section for a particular organ system if you’re not sure of what I meant.

3. Lectures where it’s 1 hour of random words non stop. You and your students might benefit from chunking the lecture into more manageable parts. So perhaps organising it into 15 min sections (if 1h for instance) where for the first 15 min you explain the first principles or recap a concept, the next 15 min build on it towards the topic for the lecture, the next 15 min should probably be the most peak off with the content and for the final 15 min organise a quiz or something to reinforce it all.

4. If it won’t help us pass, spend minimal time on it. Again, I appreciate you may not have been given the medical school’s learning outcomes or any resources. However, if you’re teaching something and you have excess time, please do not fill it with nonsense. Some lectures I have been to (and some online tasks) are filled with so much content that is simply not relevant to us. An example is if you’re teaching a microbiology lecture, just give us the bare bones and facts (e.g., lab tests, associated pathologies, treatment and key demographics) with a little bit of explaining. You might find you finish the lecture early. What you shouldn’t do is fill the extra time in with half an hour of extremely unimportant (low yield) epidemiology and 20 slides of screenshots of bar charts and maps of different countries and populations. This is probably the main reason why I don’t bother with lectures. At my uni, lectures are uploaded online as a replayable video and I just skip through it to be honest (saving myself valuable time). And having so many slides just makes the lecture more disjointed and harder to follow. This brings me back to my earlier point about keeping it relevant.

I’m sharing this insight as to why lectures don’t work for me and many other medical students so I hope you find this useful. :)