Lectures.

Nick Thomas, History:
Certainly I personally I know a lot of members of staff don't actually keep notes so many members of staff will go into a lecture without notes, they will give the lecture, and that's it. Not much good for dyslexic students who need the notes in advance.

I don't give a word for word lecture. So I'll have, you know, powerpoint lectures with bullet points, which means that if students want word for word notes then I don't have them. I don't think it's particularly effective way of giving a lecture, it's boring.

The powerpoint lecture notes can be very useful, and if I have a dyslexic student sitting in the class they will get copies of those lectures notes in advance. There can be up to 20 or 30 slides for an hour because I do use a lot of images. I use things like cartoons for instance I use photographs, paintings, you name it.

So the student needs to attend the lecture in order to get the most out of those things, but certainly getting the notes in advance is possible because I have those kind of things produced well in advance of the lecture. So that can be something that is useful for dyslexic students.

Joe Cornfield, student, Mathematical Sciences:
A lot of the maths lecturers print off the, some print off the lecture notes and hand them out before the lectures and some just have them available on the internet. We don't really use WebCT in the maths department but they just use a web page and publish the notes in pdf and you can print them off before you go to lectures, and that's the case with nearly all maths lecturers.

Kate:
So you're printing off and looking through before you go to the lecture?

Joe:
Not really looking through before, just reading through as the lecture progresses and then being able to annotate specific bits.

Alex Sallis, MA student, Politics:
Also, I find it very useful if lecturers provide lecture notes of varying degrees. Some provide quite extensive notes, they're very helpful. Some provide slides and they printout handouts of slides, that's also very helpful. I imagine it's helpful for all students but particularly I think for myself when I'm missing quite a lot in the lectures.

Kate:
Can I ask you how do you use the lecture notes that are provided? Do you sort of print them off before hand? Or is it something that you have during? How do you actually use them?

Alex:
Certainly this year the lecture notes are given to us at the beginning of the lecture and then throughout that lecture you can take notes. Certainly the ones that are more skeletal is, for example, lecture handouts slides, they're quite skeletal - they've got the main points, now we're meant to fill out kind of the other information.