While the traditional lecture no longer meets students’ learning expectations and capabilities, careful reinvention can ensure its continued relevance. Soheil Davari and Oksana Gerwe reveal how the format can become a fulcrum for dialogue and deeper thinking, underlining the changing role of academic faculty and the value of a shared intellectual experience in our digital era
students now using multiple learning channels and moving quickly between topics. While a traditional lecture can bring students together as a group to think, question and explore an idea, it fails to fulfil contemporary demands for a degree of interaction. A lecture’s long, uninterrupted monologue can even feel overwhelming in our current era. The students arriving at business schools and universities today have grown up in a world in which phones, tablets and computers have been ever-present, leading them to approach learning differently to members of previous generations. Gen Z are accustomed to spending hours online each day. They are used to switching between sources, verifying facts and customising their own learning. For them, lengthy sessions with a single stream of information often feel difficult to stay engaged with, not due to a lack of motivation but due to the students’ tendency towards consuming content in shorter, more focused segments. These students expect teaching to match the pace and style of the digital world. Gen Z is not struggling with attention; they are simply used to learning in environments where information
efore the rise of digital platforms and our constant access to online resources, the lecture was the heart of university life, serving as the primary method for sharing
knowledge. Students would convene, often in large halls, to hear an academic expert present their insights and ideas. This was the standard format for distributing scarce knowledge because it was the most practical and efficient method. Long before mass publishing, digital resources or open-access information, the academic held knowledge that students simply could not access elsewhere. The lecture emerged, therefore, as a necessary solution to the technological and informational constraints of its time. Recognising this historical context helps explain why the traditional lecture format struggles to meet the expectations and capabilities of today’s learners, who operate in a world where information is abundant, immediate and personalised. Moreover, the educational environment has undergone a significant transformation, with
18 Ambition • ISSUE 3 • 2026
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