Lectorial

I just finished a study group on Learn You a Haskell for Great Good.  Which was a great experience, for many reasons, but I think the way each session was structured into a combination of lecture and tutorial deserves particular attention.

The weekly structure was fairly straight forward: a chapter leader covers a chapter the week before the rest of group, writes a summary and some programming questions.  The weekly sessions took about an hour and a half.  This consisted of the chapter leader going through their summary allowing the group to interject with questions and answers (if the chapter leader didn't know) or there might be some furious Googling to find a good reference or answer that someone half remembered.  The programming questions and answers would usually go around the table, each person would answer a question and the others would then comment on it or show their answer if it was particularly different (or shorter or whatever).  The time was roughly 60/40 from lecture to programming/tutorial.

Compared to university courses, where you often had two hours of lectures and then one or two hours of tutorials often spread out over a week, this arrangement seemed to be very time efficient.  The other advantage was getting the students to run the study group.   The chapter leader has to spend a lot more time making sure they understood the chapter in order to answer any questions that would come up during the review and to set the programming questions.  For me, setting the questions and making sure you had answers (and by the end of it tests to help people along) was probably the best part of the learning experience.  There was no real hiding if you hadn't done the answers either - partially because it was such a small group but also because of the high level of participation.

It'd be interesting if there were university courses where you were graded not just on an examination and assignments but the questions you set and if you were able to run a small group of people through a class.  It would also make tutorials more relevant which are often dropped by students.

It seems "lectorial" also means, "large tutorial in a lecture hall to give context around information given in lectures".  They also mention small group activities and class lead presentations so there is some overlap.