What makes a good lecture?

Everybody learns in different ways and responds to different stimuli. There are however, some key things that I have found vary greatly. 1)Delivery 2)Form 3)Content 4)Application Delivery You can really tell when when a lecturer is enthusiastic and passionate about what they teach. Hence goes the saying 'practice what you preach',. A lecturer that comes across disinterested is not going to convince his/her students the content is worth learning. And yes, you do have to actively engage and connect with students to actually get the intended message across. There are lots of things competing for our attention :) Form The worst way to communicate something is to read directly off of lecture slides. Lecture slides are nearly always made available online allowing students to read them in their own time. When I go to a lecture, I want something extra. I want to get something that I'm not going to get reading the lecture notes. The more interactive the lecture is the better. People are less likely to fall asleep and more likely to pay attention. This year I have had the pleasure of enjoying Andrew's lectures that include role playing multi threaded scenarios :) and interactive demos. Both of which, provide an excellent supplement to lecture material. I have also seen a few lectures by Andrew and one from Rajesh presented in a slightly different manner I think referred to as beyond bullet points. Slides are not littered with bullet points but rather a single image/graphic/cartoon used to stimulate higher order cognitive thinking with the intention of conveying one clear concise point. As the saying goes, "...a picture speaks a thousand words". Content I would think obvious but content selection is important. Content needs to be updated when it gets old. I have had lectures where the material had not been updated in a few years. So long in fact, the original typos had errors, left behind from its original debut. Providing good reference material is a must. If the reference material is good enough, people can be coerced to self-learn using this material. Web links, articles, selected text books etc. Application The application of work is just as important. Finding a really good application can sometimes be tough when you have a certain amount of things to assess. BUT, think of the application as another form of delivery system. Just like any delivery system a poor one yields little uptake. How much, if any, of your material do you want people to take in? A poor application with little to no context is equivalent to spouting words that fall on deaf ears. In other words, if you are not going to provide a decent delivery system (application) don't bother. Some of the best applications of content I have seen have come out of Object Oriented Programming, Advanced .NET, AI and Operating Systems. Each of which had strong applications for carrying home the appropriate material.