Lectures, Seminars and Tutorials

Lectures can offer an introduction, an explanation, or a springboard for further research. Unlike tutorials or seminars, you may not get the same opportunities to interact or ask questions, so it’s important that you get as much out of lectures as you can.

This resource gives advice on what to do before and during a lecture, and it’s designed to maximise your experience of listening, understanding, and recording information.

Your tutors might ask you to familiarise yourself with some aspects of the lecture beforehand. This might take the form of a piece of reading you need to complete, or they might suggest you read up on a topic beforehand to obtain an overview. This is often useful as thinking about the topic beforehand can help you identify areas you are unsure about and which you might want to pay particular attention to during the lecture. It also means you are more likely to be an active rather than a passive listener and retain the information more effectively.

Tutors often provide lecture slides beforehand and these can be useful to gain an overview as well as make some notes on. Use these to:​​​​​​

• Familiarise yourself with key concepts and vocabulary. 
• Annotate, underlining terms or ideas that you don’t understand so you can listen out for explanations of them in the lecture. 
• Identify where the lecture fits in with the rest of the module, so you get a sense of how it contributes to what you already know about it and how it is more broadly relates to other lectures and the intended learning outcomes for your module.

Approach lectures purposefully 

Try to avoid simply ‘attending’ the lecture, be an active participant; when you have obtained an overview of the lecture through any pre-released slides or preparatory reading, decide what your personal objectives are for the lecture, what you want to get out of it. This depends on your level of understanding. You may want to: 

• To obtain definitions  
• To obtain examples  
• To obtain more detailed explanations  
• To identify further reading or research you should look at  
• To prepare for an assignment  ​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​Your purpose will influence how you prepare for the lecture, what kind of notes you make and what you do after the lecture. 

One of the most important skills as a student is the ability to focus and concentrate. If you aren’t focusing or concentrating, it’s likely you’ll not be making the most of the opportunities to learn.

• Lectures are not the place to send or check text messages; this isn’t only distracting for lecturers but also for the other students, and, if you are doing this in a lecture, you’re likely to be getting far less out of it.  
• Pre-released lecture notes are not designed to replace the lecture, they’re designed to complement it. Don’t be tempted to think that just because you’ve got the notes, you don’t need to attend the lecture.  
• During the lecture, you’ll be presented with three main challenges: you need to be able to make notes, listen, and understand simultaneously. Some students find this overwhelming to begin with, and you may feel like you need to write everything down. Use your notemaking skills wisely - writing everything down will not help if you haven’t understood what is being said, so listen closely to maximise your understanding.  
• Try to focus on the way the lecture is structured and what the purpose and key themes or points are. Lecturers will usually organise their lecture to emphasise important points through signposting. This can be structural, for example, the lecturer might say: “I’ll give you a brief introduction first, then give some examples and conclude by...”. 
• Look out for any learning outcomes identified at the beginning of the lecture, often in the first couple of slides, but also links to any previous or subsequent lectures that will help you build up a picture of how the lecture relates to the wider module.  
• Exeter is an international university, so adjusting to a lecturer’s personal style of delivery might also involve you adjusting to a wide variety of accents from around the world, or from within the UK.  
• Assessing how much to note down for a lecture depends on several things, but most importantly, your purpose. Identifying what you want to get out of the lecture will help you to decide what to record and how much of it to record; make note of any questions that arise that you might want to follow up after the lecture, or in a tutorial with your tutor.  
• Think about how you can effectively work with other students. Arrange to meet up after the lecture with another student, or group of students, to discuss what you did and did not understand. Sharing and discussing information can really deepen your understanding and make you feel more confident about your understanding of the lecture content. 

Depending on your course, some lectures may be delivered online. This has a number of advantages however; online learning also brings its own challenges. Whilst online lectures can be shorter and allow flexibility about when you access the lecture, you should approach online lectures with the same purposeful approach outlined above. 

Here are some additional tips:  

• Make sure you have the appropriate technology to hand, that your laptop has any appropriate software needed, that you know how to access recorded lectures or online lectures, and that your camera, speaker and microphone are working properly.  
• A lecture theatre is designed for lectures, watching a recorded lecture in a noisy or busy environment is not likely to be conducive to getting the most out of the lecture, so think about the environment in which you will best be able to give the lecture your full attention.  
• Be mindful of turning your camera and microphone off during live lectures, background noises from unmuted microphones and on camera activity can be distracting for yourself and other students. This can also help with bandwidth if your broadband connection is prone to problems.  
• Whilst recorded lectures means you can pause the lecture to make notes, this can lead to excessive notetaking and poor time management, so try not to let a one-hour recording take up three hours of your time.
• You can find some tips for making notes during online lectures in our Notemaking guide.

Some of the lectures you attend at university will be very challenging. Understanding isn’t always an immediate process, so you will need focus and take time to go through the information and ideas. Here are a few tips to help you: 

1. Buy a good subject-specific dictionary to help you with subject specific vocabulary. Keep vocabulary lists and try to learn any new words or terms.  
2. Use core texts from your Reading List to give you the general outline of a subject before you go to the lecture.  
3. Try to work out where the lecture fits in with the other lectures for this module. How does the content link to what you have learned so far?  
4. Try to keep the purpose of the lecture in mind. For example, is it describing research? Or is it a literature review? Is it outlining a key theory? Is it critiquing or building on another theory? If you know the purpose you will be clearer about which part is causing you difficulty.  
5. Try to locate the main points of the lecture. Focus very hard on the introduction and conclusion as there will be strong clues here.  
6. Work through complex concepts and try to establish their meaning by summarising and putting things in your own words in your notes.  
7. Discuss the lecture content with other students and with your lecturer. You will probably find that you are not the only one finding it challenging.  
8. Most importantly, be an active learner rather than a passive listener. 
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