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The introduction of technology into the lecture theatre looks set to reduce the number of lectures by about two-thirds and significantly improve student learning, but only if academics accept radical changes to their working lives.

Tony Bates, a founding member of the Open University and director of distance education at the University of British Columbia, this week revealed the results of experiments that showed students taught by CD-Rom gained better results than those attending face-to-face lectures.

Speaking in York at the first annual conference of the Institute for Learning and Teaching, Professor Bates said his research revealed that students learning from a CD-Rom had 30 per cent better recall after three months compared with a control group attending conventional lectures.

"There are probably two reasons," he said. "First, the students can refer back to their work more easily, and second classroom lectures are transient and it is easy to miss bits."

The challenge now, he said, is to know when to use face-to-face lecturing and when to introduce technology. "We are not saying that lectures have no value," he stressed. "But lecturers will need to work differently, very differently, if we are to reap the huge benefits of educational technology."

The problem in both Canada and the United Kingdom is that there is little incentive for academics to spend time developing new educational tools. "As long as there is no proper reward system, you will only get a proportion - probably less than half - of the teaching staff of a university involved in new teaching technology."

The solution, he said, was for academics to develop their own vision of where they want to go with teaching innovations and for institutions to develop a strategy to make it happen. Lectures would then be reduced in number and, since students would get used to doing their work before attending, they would evolve into discussion and problem-solving sessions, which could significantly improve the quality of learning.