John F. Kennedy once said, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other”. This means you have to keep learning if you want to make outstanding achievements in any field you may find yourself in. Knowledge can be gotten in different ways, but for the sake of this paper, I will focus on comparing a seminar and a lecture: their definitions, application, and how they are different from each other. The main difference between these two has to do with factors such as duration, the number of people involved, approach, and importance.
Definition of Seminar
A seminar is defined as a gathering meant for delivering speeches or discussing a common topic among less than twenty persons. From this definition, you can deduce that the number of people involved in this setting is not up to twenty. In some cases, it is limited to 16 or even less. Another point is that the gathering is more or less a platform for participants to receive speeches and discuss a common topic.
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This type of gathering can be academic in nature as seen in schools, especially in the universities. It is usually set up between students and their professors, and every person involved is expected to participate, that is if it the meeting is practical in nature. If it is not a practical one, then the participants are expected to pay attention to the instructor.
Aside from schools, organizations and businesses also organize this type of meeting for training purposes especially. This is usually aimed at skill development and improvement. Standard organizations organize multiple seminars for their workers per year to keep them up to speed with the latest developments in the required field. This type of gathering is usually approached from a professional and practical perspective.
Definition of Lecture
A lecture is defined as an oral presentation of information to a group of people on a particular topic, following an approach that is either theoretical, practical, or a combination of both. In a comparison between a lecture and a seminar, the similarity can be seen in the fact that these two constitute a gathering of some sort, but one of the differences can be seen in the numbers. The latter involves less than nineteen people per group, but the former deals with way more than that.
This sort of gathering is the most common in educational establishments, such as universities. One instructor or lecturer can take more than two hundred people in one go. According to experts, beneficiaries who are newbies would benefit more from lectures, as it involves greater exposure to the subject matter, which is why it is the most acceptable form of instruction in the international education setting.
In summary, this type of gathering is characterized by large gatherings that can even be more than two hundred people at once, all of whom are expected to pay attention to the instructor. So, another characteristic is that the teacher is the center of attention. Students are expected to earn by listening, and more often than not, every meeting of this nature exposes the students to new information.
Main Differences Between a Seminar and a Lecture
In this section I'm going to take a more detailed look at how they compare to one another. First, by definition, a seminal is a gathering meant for delivering speeches or discussing a common topic among less than twenty persons, while a lecture – an oral presentation of information to a group of people on a particular topic following an approach that is either theoretical, practical, or a combination of both. As mentioned above, a seminar is designed for less than twenty participants, while a lecture can be given to more than two hundred people, but a minimum of forty people. The duration of a seminar is from twenty minutes to one hour, and the duration of a lecture is from half an hour to over an hour. Two-way communication prevails at a seminar, and one-way communication is more typical for a lecture. And finally, the information presented in lectures is usually new, but in seminars it is often not new.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the difference between a seminar and a lecture is obvious. These differences can be seen in the number of people involved, the nature of the meeting, the method of communication employed, and the type of information shared.