What is a lecture? In a lecture the student listens while the lecturer lecturers.  Usually the lecture is approximately 50 minutes long and the audience size ranges from a small number to several hundred.   There may be little or no students participation.  The lecture essentially a one-way process of communication, however, some lecturers are willing to adapt their lecturing methods to suit their purposes and do not follow the traditional lecture format.

Lectures are the most common form of tertiary teaching, so it's important to think about their purposes.  These can include:

• giving information to large numbers of people,
• providing the opportunity for formal discussion in a subject,
• serving as a starting point for private study,
• drawing together the main ideas in a new research area,
• providing an outline of difficult reading material,
• reviewing literature which is difficult to find, and
• adapting a subject for a particular audience in a way that a standard course text can't

Before the lecture