How can undergraduate lectures, coursework, and exams be made more interesting?

Question

I am the lecturer

Answer 1

Look at Open University material for your subject. Their teaching methods are generally excellent. Involve your students more, get them doing the work that gets them thinking. Experiential learning is a must, don't tell them - show them how, expand their minds. Attention to different learning styles is also important, include visual, auditory and kinaesthetic elements in your lesson plans. Make your lectures interesting, varied and passionate. Don't just roll out your Ph.D (unless of course it is groundbreaking and worldshatteringly brilliant). Show them what excites you, your aha! moments, and the interesting paradoxes and juxtapositions that still energise you to look deeper. Stimulate questions rather than answers. Most of all - use humour, make it fun!

Exams are only interesting if the student is confident, well prepared and rehearsed. Do some test questions and work through them getting the students to provide the answer as a group, outloud. Be clear about your marking criteria. If you tell them exactly what you want then you can measure how well they have done it. If you expect them to guess what you want from them then all you are measuring is their ability to guess.

Answer 2

Talk to your students about it (although you don't have to adopt everything they suggest). I have found that not all students want the same thing. When I first started teaching I put a lot of effort into making my classes "interesting", and the students loved it; however, when I asked them WHY I had done a particular experiential exercise, or told a particular story, they weren't able to tell me. In other words, while current pedagogy tells us that students learn better if they are "engaged", that has often been translated as meaning that students should be entertained, and entertainment can become a distraction for the learning.