Teaching, learning and media use in today’s lectures

•We observe how 21 lecturers and 86 students use (mobile) technology in lectures.•We examine lecture-related and -unrelated student activities.•We examine how lecturer and student activity are linked during a lecture.•Lecturers mainly broadcast information and rarely apply advanced instruction.•Students focus more on lecture-unrelatedthan on lecture-relatedactivities. Lectures are designed to deliver new information to a large group of students. Apart from actual lecturing, lecturers may also encourage elaboration of learning material with advanced instructions, like advance organizer, summaries and repetitions as well as questions. Prerequisite to learning from lectures is that students focus on the lecture and cognitively process what is being presented. In today’s lectures, mobile devices, (i.e. laptops and smartphones), may aid students to research additional information online or to take notes, but may also distract students. In this descriptive study, 86 students with 91 mobile devices out of five lectures were observed with respect to how they utilized mobile devices for lecture-related and -unrelated activities. Additionally, we observed 21 lecturers and coded their behavior. The results indicate that lecturing correlates only slightly with student activities. Students use media mostly in a lecture-unrelated way. Giving negative feedback seems to foster students’ lecture-unrelated media use.