Podcast #5: Sex, Lectures and Videotape with Laurie Santos

In this episode Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos talks to us about what it’s like to lecture about Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature to almost 600 undergraduates in a chapel.

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Show Notes

0:00 ⏯ Intro

1:28 ⏯ Lori’s research on the evolutionary origin of human thought. Sometimes we’re less rational than monkeys (or slime mold).

2:57 ⏯ “Sex, Evolution and Human Nature” aka ‘Sexy Psych’ aka PSYC 171.

3:45 ⏯ Almost 600 students and how the course grew so big.

5:25 ⏯ An interdisciplinary course, stupid cat videos, and anthropomorphism.

7:31 ⏯ Subjectivity and mating strategies.

8:12 ⏯ Why do students take the course? Human nature as a fundamental problem.

9:32 ⏯ “Use your hymnal as a surface on which to write your quiz.”

12:55 ⏯ Does the room where the exam takes place affect student performance? Maybe

15:14 ⏯ Yale’s coming expansions, and its possible impacts.

17:00 ⏯ Lecture attendance, open courses, copyright challenges. Who owns open course and MOOC content?

22:15 ⏯ When a video lecture that’s free becomes a part of someone else’s paid course. Who owns the video lecture?

24:25 ⏯ Since others are sharing content, students don’t need to come to class.

26:51 ⏯ Students share content with others, and they don’t see themselves as facilitating cheating.

29:08 ⏯ Why sharing resources short-circuits many assignments–and how assessment will have to change.

33:36 ⏯ Students design their own experiments using public data.

37:00 ⏯ Grading 500+ students: each teaching fellow grades a single quiz or assignment.

39:11 ⏯ Why is a live lecture preferable to a video? “The theater of being there.”

41:17 ⏯ The psychology of the live lecture–and the liveness of online chatting.

Software that tracks student understanding during lecture: Learning Catalytics

45:09 ⏯ Offending others, slips of the tongue, mating strategies, and trigger warnings.

49:15 ⏯ Is the professor the master of her own teaching?

53:16 ⏯ Is student sensitivity a new thing?

56:40 ⏯ Inspiring teachers, the lecture as a social interaction, using psychological expertise and Transcranial magnetic stimulation to lecture.

1:03:40 ⏯ Teaching mistakes and apologizing to the horseshoe crab (and to reality).