The paper analyses data from the Competences in Context project whereby a corpus of lectures given by faculty members of the University of Amsterdam was collected. Based on the observation that some experienced lecturers consistently generate high levels of student response, regardless of the subject matter of the course and the specific student population they are faced with, the paper seeks to identify the specific features of a lecturer’s discourse style that feed into emergent open learning cultures and empowered participation roles. The paper refers to the metaphor of the handyman as well as other verbal and non-verbal strategies employed by the lecturers in the framework of a less formal and more egalitarian modelling of academic roles.