A new series from Adam Fein, Vice President for Digital Strategy and Innovation at UNT & Tania Heap, Director of Learning Research and Accessibility at UNT on what post-Covid higher education should look like. The first installment urges colleges and universities to put an end to in-person lecture halls. There is so much more we can do with these spaces.

There may be nothing more iconic in higher education that the traditional lecture hall. Quasi-auditoriums that serve as the interior bones of the external Georgian architecture we’ve known for centuries. And the lecture. The historical, customary manner in which one who has knowledge synchronously passes information along to hungry minds; a practice dating back to 500 B.C. In my twenty years of work in higher education, the topic of lectures and lecture halls — their effectiveness and ongoing necessity — has been commonplace. Despite a preponderance of evidence-based research suggesting that changes to lectures and lecture halls would benefit quality, not much has changed. In fact, in the undergraduate space, many public and private universities are still centered around both the lecture and the lecture hall.