Podcasts of University Lectures? 601
theslashdot asks: "I'm working at a major university in the US, and have been charged with posting pod-casts of class lectures on the internet. The problem is whether or not posting the videos would allow students to skip class and just download the lecture, instead. I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam. So what methods can be used to provide these pod-casts for the students who actually attended class? In terms of when the lecture should be posted, what would be a good time-frame? Immediately after the class? 24 hours? One week? One class behind schedule?"
"In terms of trying to prevent this, here are some possible solutions I've come up with:
- Post the lecture with authentication based on the class list for those enrolled in the course, although this would not really discourage truancy.
- Post the lecture with authentication based on those who attended the class (student cards would have to be barcode-scanned at the beginning of class); this would prevent those who missed the class from downloading the lecture, but presumably they could receive a copy from a student who did attend the class. Additionally it would create a major hassle for all students to ensure that their attendance is registered.
- Post the lecture with a single password that the professor distributes to the class during the lecture. This would discourage students from missing the lecture, but likely those students missing class could simply obtain the password from another student who did attend the class."
- Post the lecture with authentication based on the class list for those enrolled in the course, although this would not really discourage truancy.
- Post the lecture with authentication based on those who attended the class (student cards would have to be barcode-scanned at the beginning of class); this would prevent those who missed the class from downloading the lecture, but presumably they could receive a copy from a student who did attend the class. Additionally it would create a major hassle for all students to ensure that their attendance is registered.
- Post the lecture with a single password that the professor distributes to the class during the lecture. This would discourage students from missing the lecture, but likely those students missing class could simply obtain the password from another student who did attend the class."
Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:5, Insightful)
None let non-students view? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just release them (Score:5, Insightful)
Just post the damn podcast (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as he is learning, I see no reason why you should try and hide lectures from kids who choose to learn in a different way. (audio as opposed to sitting through class) Listening to all of them the day before an exam is no different from cramming the night before.
University's bottom line? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to help out good students put up these podcasts. Don't make it harder to get at because of a few bad apples, don't penalize good students because of the bad ones.
And then, there's the bottom line for all universities. Are they still paying for the class? Then get off their fuckin' backs about showing up all the time.
Good students will still turn up (Score:2, Insightful)
The "Bad" students still WONT turn up to lectures, they never did in the first place, and they will download these pod casts, and not learn anything.
The "other" students wont turn up to lectures, they never have, but they have never needed to, they already know the infomation and are going though the paces to get a peice of paper to prove it, they may download the pod cast, but it doensn't really matter when they listen to it, as its just going to tell them what they already know.
Btw im in the "other" section, after lectures being late, not speaking english, not turning up at all, not knowing wtf they are doing, i've ceased going to lectures except for two or three subjects where i get on well with the lecturer. This i dont waste hours of my day walking into university (college for you us kids) only to find the lecture is cancled/dead/blown up.
I revise from books and the internet, and so far i've had some of the best rates i've ever had (~65% instead of the 40%~ i used to get in schools.)
So.... this will change nothing. Enjoy
Instructor's responsibility (Score:2, Insightful)
And despite this seeming to be a replacement for in class instruction, students who don't attend class miss out on the ability to question material as it's presented.
You're basically asking for a simple, effective DRM scheme. If you come up with one, you'll be rich (but hated on Slashdot
Jon
Provide them the info, don't babysit (Score:3, Insightful)
Provide them the information you think is necessary in whatever form, and allow them to determine how they will use it.
Re:Just post the damn podcast (Score:3, Insightful)
there are still problems with skipping class and just listening to podcast, such as, if they have any questions about the material, both in the podcast and in the reading, they will not have the opportunity to ask them
also, if podcasts are only online for a part of the time, there is nothing stopping students from getting podcasts from someone who has saved them all.
I hate this "school" of thought. (Score:5, Insightful)
I treated college as a rubber stamp that I needed to get a job. Did I learn things? Yes. Did I do it by sitting in class? No, I did it by doing the assignments, or just learning what I needed to right before the test. I pick things up quickly and one reading of the textbook of a subject I'm interested in is good enough for me to remember where to go when I need the information again (or to classify the information so I can find it later). College isn't (and shouldn't be!) about rote memorization of stupid facts. If you're teaching me to think, then do it by challenging me (not making me sit in a lecture while you talk at me and I'm eyeing the girl two rows away). If you're trying to force me to learn something, give up hope right now -- you can't force someone to learn something when they don't want to.
I welcome all the responses telling me that I'm an idiot or whatever, that's fine. I'm a bit full of myself with regards to how quickly I pick things up (and no, I don't remember everything -- but I will remember that there was something that I don't know the details of 100%, and will then know to look for it again to re-learn it when I need to use it). Why force me to be on the same level of the people who are also there for the rubber stamp, but are on the bottom end of the pool of applicants? I went to a school and in to a major that had a rather noticeable lack of various groups (blacks, women), and it was somewhat apparent that there were a few people in the school who got there to equalize the numbers and not because of ability. Why force me on their level? The person I'm thinking of actually asked a college level, calculus-based physics-for-engineers professor to explain how 3x = 2x + 10 became 5x = 10, x=2 (the numbers might have been different, but it was similarly simplistic).
I was a TA in one-on-one labs, gave several lectures and presentations, etc. I continue to do so to this day, at my current job. Guess what? I don't care if the students remember what I say, that's up to them to want to do. If the people who DO care remember that the information is out there and it's accessible later, then I've done my job. If all they have is a powerpoint presentation with a couple brief sentences at the end when they want to go back to the information, then I consider my job a failure, but that's another discussion.
Basically -- You're going to do this, some of the students will find a way around it (the smart ones), the other students will use said way around it (the lazy ones, not necessarily different from the smart ones), and you'll just piss people off. Don't.
a good way to get people to attend class (Score:3, Insightful)
Just post the lectures (Score:5, Insightful)
Take the case of a university student who does as you say, and skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and still does well in the class. The university still gets paid. The professor still gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing greater attention to the students who do choose to be there. The skipping student does well, and gets a good grade, and the professor has a more attentive and interested audience. Everyone wins.
Now, take the case of the student who skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and bombs the course. The university gets paid. The professor gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing for greater attention for the students who are there. The skipping student does poorly, and either learns to go to lecture in the future, or gets booted out of school. Everyone wins except for the student, who only screwed himself.
Just put up the podcasts.
"bad student?" (Score:3, Insightful)
I watched about 40% of all my lectures at Stanford on a TV screen, time shifted from the lecture. At Stanford this practice is encouraged.
It works better for me personally, the crowd in the classroom is often distracting, and I waste time carting my body all over campus.
You can hear better, pause to take notes or read up on a topic in the book in the middle of the lecture when you get lost -- there are losts of positive benefits from video-based classes. Most I played back at 1.5x speed, so the voice gota bit whiny, but it was over in 40 minutes instead of an hour. What I LOVED was for topics I already know about, I could skip them.
In my opinoion, the premise in education that people have to be forced to attend is completely detrimental to the learning environment - it harms those there who want to learn. Manditory attendance is required when there has been a removal of accountability for those who choose not to learn.
Just post it! (Score:3, Insightful)
How exactly is this a problem? I can speak from experience (and anecdotal evidence == cold hard data 'round these parts) that posting lectures online is certainly not going to prevent students from going to class. Furthermore, you're going to have students that don't want to go to class regardless of having the lectures online (I'm sure you're well aware of this, especially if you've had to teach an 8am class). What I think you should realize is that students not coming to class is NOT a personal knock on you, your teaching abilities, the size of your penis, or anything else.
Another thing that you should realize is that while some students [sarcasm]obviously[/sarcasm] have much better things to do than going to class, that doesn't mean they don't want to learn. One of my favorite classes last year was a psych class where the professor posted her powerpoint lecture notes before class. They were great to print out and bring to class (when I went) and great to print out and study from when 9am Monday morning just wasn't an option. Honestly, do you think you're benefitting the students that don't go to class by trying to withhold the lecture notes? If you're that hell-bent on having students attend, give extra points for attendance or class participation. Or *gasp* grade the students on what pertinent subject matter they actually learned. Let tests and quizzes speak for themselves. If studends can learn on their own with just the lecture notes, let them be. Some students left to their own devices can thumb through a book and listen to a class lecture at the gym and learn just as much as by attending classes. If they have questions on the material, they're perfectly capable of attending class or finding you during office hours.
As a student, I say don't be a hardass and let students learn how they feel they should. If they don't attend and fail, it's no skin off your back. If they don't attend and pass with flying colors, let them be. Don't try to DRM your class lectures just to encourage attendance. More than anything, I think you'll just alienate the ones that don't like coming to class anyway. Don't try to get cute and just post the flippin' podcasts.
Re:Instructor's responsibility (Score:3, Insightful)
If they can watch you on video, they get the exact same amount out of the class that they would have if they sat passively in the room.
If there are external methods of asking questions about things that weren't clear on the video (newsgroups, for example) that you moderate but don't even need to respond in, then they can ask questions and get just as much out of it as they would have if they were sitting in the room actively asking questions. More so, in fact, since it's 1) easier for the other students to skip over stupid questions, and 2) recorded, so you can go back if it was just "I didn't hear that because I was staring at this girl over here", and the responses are recorded (on the newsgroups themselves) so that they can go back in the future to find out the answer.
If the student already knows the material, why force them to waste their time sitting in the class? Either let them test out of it (most colleges won't allow this), or just shut up and give them the quizzes. If you're testing what they need to know, and that's what you were teaching, then congratulations.. if they pass your test, then they know the information you were supposed to be giving them. What's the problem here?
This is Tech for Tech's Sake (fer chrissake...) (Score:4, Insightful)
The professor is being charged with educating the student; if he, being assisted by a download and that omnipresent little white box, can succeed in accomplishing that education without a student even entering his classroom, more power to him, sez me. Of course, we all know the issue is one of ego. The prof wants to be hi-tech hip with his words downloadable daily, yet he still wants to see a full lecture hall hanging upon every word of wisdom as if they were dollops of moist angel food.
Now, to answer your actual question. Set up a matrix of authentication codes, columns of lecture dates by rows of students. The prof hands them out at the end of each lecture, all good for a single podcast download of the lecture they just heard (WTF? But hey, that's the academic ego, I suppose...) The code is your daily password, your SS# is your UID. Of course, if you want to give both your code AND and your SS# to your truant bud, nothing stops you except the ickiness, and the fact that the code is good for only one download of that lecture.
A suggestion: (Score:5, Insightful)
An attendance policy? Miss class 6 times, you fail. That's the policy at my university, and it works.
Make attendance "mandatory" (Score:2, Insightful)
My biggest beef is "dumb" questions being asked during lecture, but that's mostly due to the fact that I understand the material very quickly. Half the time I fall asleep or begin working on some other thing (program assignment for that class due next week or work for another class). Having lectures really does help so that I can go back and see if I missed something during the time I was half-listening.
Now most of my professors are using presentations done with power point and making them available. Much better than a podcast considering they're chinese(haven't even bothered to ask what they're first language actually is). Of course, your situation will vary.
Podcasts not as good as transcripts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good students will still turn up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:2, Insightful)
But are they learning if they are not part of the interaction between the teacher and the class?
No questions asked, none answered.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:None let non-students view? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any university-level classes for those topics could exist simply as a battery of exams to verify understanding of the topic, preceded by a period of time (say, a semester) during which the student has access to an expert in the field and goes to them with questions, but just watches the videos and reads printed material most of the time. Anyone who wants to learn it but doesn't want to pay and doesn't care about any kind of official recognition of their understanding of the topic can just pay for the videos, or download them for free (it's not like they'd need to keep making new ones, after all), or whatever.
Labs, language classes, and higher-level courses could all be taught the traditional way.
Why not?
Re:A suggestion: (Score:1, Insightful)
Universities are there to allow people to learn, and to grant degrees. They shouldn't be there to hold your hand, or force you to follow pointless rules.
Seriously - do the staff and policy-makers hold themselves to the same standards? Do they fire themselves if they miss 6 meetings in a year? I don't think so. And as someone who has been both student and staff, I can guarantee that they miss meetings (and emails, and letters, and deadlines).
Again - what a crappy university.
Don't let the bad students stop you (Score:2, Insightful)
However, I think that you will find there is not much you can do to make the bad students do the right thing. In high school they constantly attempted to force students to learn when they did not want to and they seldom had good results. I would say that you should help the good students to the best of your ability and give the bad students the best encouragement, support, and advice that you can. After that let them sink or swim.
Lastly, not doing something to help good students simply because it could make it easier for slackers is wrong because it punishes the good students. Having said that, I do not know if having the podcasts out there will really help anyone or not. They would not have been much help to me except when I was sick, but some people may find them useful.
"You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink; you can take a student to school but you can't make him think."
-Unknown
It matters only who. (Score:5, Insightful)
In stadium classes, for example, interaction has been deemed impractical. Most professors simply lecture, and people with questions are forced to wait until afterwards and scramble for the few moments the professor is cleaning up, or attempt to make office hours, which consist of a small hour or two hour window that usually falls during one of your other classes. In a class like this, what's the difference if the students are there or not? If they have questions, they just try to make office hours anyway.
In smaller, but still lower level classes, interaction between the student and teacher may be encouraged by the professor, but is usually never reciprocated by the student. Most of my classes, the students just sit there silent when the teacher asks a question, and the professor is forced to answer themselves. I assume this has come about due to the abundance of unfriendly or quiet teachers, as well as the fear of getting questions wrong, or the fear of peer ridicule. Usually, I'm the only one in my classes who even speaks to the professor, let alone answer questions. Again, what's the difference? I'd rather have those quiet people at home anyway, so the teacher pays more attention to me.
Only in the higher level, VERY small classes have I found the reverse to be true. Here, interaction is the point of the entire class. If there are only 10 people in your class, and you don't get it, comprehension has just dropped 10%. (Can you tell I'm a Math/Computer Science major?) Of course, in these classes, such a podcast doesn't make sense, but I assume it's not the sort of class the news post is asking about.
Of course, if the professor in question is a good professor, the engaging, interactive, interesting, imaginative type who we always want as teachers but never seem to get, they shouldn't have a problem drawing people to their actual lectures anyway. People should WANT to come, and the ones that don't want to probably shouldn't be there anyway: they just sit in the back, and cause disturbances when their cell phones ring or they spill their Vente Mocha Decaf Frappichinos.
Re:Good students will still turn up (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure going from 40% to 65% is a stunning recommendation of how you never need to attend lectures, because you know it all already.
As one of the 'good' students (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole 'keep the bad students from skipping' is a ridiculous stance in the first place. There is an obvious correlation between class attendance and overall grades in most cases. It is irritating as all get out when I get into a class where a TA or professor decides to play nanny, and take attendance, or restrict access to class material because 'students will skip'. All you're doing by restricting access is making students like me, who do go to class and do get excellent grades, jump through a massive number of irritating hoops.
It's college, not a babysitting program. Whatever happened to personal responsibility of the student to get to class? We're all adults there.
Exactly, most of the time it doesn't (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no negative here. In fact universities should do more telelearning on campus with virtual classrooms and lecture halls.
I mean, how much time and effort is spent per day simply traversing campus? Two hours here, an hour and a half there, walk five miles a day with a load of baggage.
Wouldn't it be better to stay in a comfortable environment with the resources of the university at your fingertips? Less tiring? More time to study and learn?
Video conferencing? Doesn't every campus have high speed networks these days?
Podcasts are a step in the right direction and a concept ripe for expansion.
Good for professors too. They only have to do a lecture once.
Biology 101 "cell division"?
It does trouble me that the author is concerned about truancy and tardiness, good students and bad. It is as though teaching and learning takes a back seat to regimented compliance to rules and protocol. That the podcast perk should only be for 'good' students.
I'd prefer to let knowledge of subject matter determine a students ranking, not how they attained it or when.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want students to attend class, create an attendance policy. Don't try to shoehorn it into your lecture-posting policy.
Re:It matters only who. (Score:3, Insightful)
Decaf
Is this what the world is coming to? And yes I can tell you're a Math/CS major. You're here. But can you explain why all math profs have a heavy foreign accent, poor grammar, and bad handwriting? Attending lecture is one thing. Understanding the words is quite another. For the orignal submitter, stop trying to fight a War On Truancy, and just make sure the podcasts have GOOD audio quality. Attending class is an important part of the educational process, but adding layers of policy tends to bog down a university and promote a more 'us against them' mentality, its just bad for morale. A better way to encourage attendance is (easy) semi-frequent surprise pop quizzes (like 'What was the topic of last lecture?') worth say 5-10% of the final grade. Make it worth their while to show up, but since you're providing a service to the students anyway don't withhold the information from those who couldn't make it (they did pay for the class at least). And the bright side is if you're helping otherwise poor students learn more despite themselves, this is a benefit to all parties involved.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:5, Insightful)
Online Learning (Score:3, Insightful)
Attendance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:5, Insightful)
My initial reaction to this story was the same as (great?) grandparent post: Why should the students attend lectures at all? In fact, I did not understand this mentality even before podcasts. There is this really old technology that deprecates lectures entirely, it is called the "book". Books are lectures you can read at any time for any reason.
Now, if there were a discussion or a question and answer session, the student would have a reason to attend. The student could learn from the professor's vast experience, and the student could ask questions about specific things not covered in the "lecture" -- or textbook or video or podcast or whatever.
Lectures were made obsolete in Europe by Gutenberg in 1447. Why are "teachers" still using this method in the classroom? If universities want to make money, they should do so by answering student's questions, not subjecting students to boring lectures read a hundred times over from yellowed notes.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:5, Insightful)
With that said, I think students generally learn much more by showing up in class. But that ought to be the student's decision. If he thinks he's a hotshot who doesn't need to attend class, let him try. If he fails, he has nobody to blame but himself. And in some classes that I had (the ones with nothing but straight lecture), attending class would have been a waste of time if I'd had audio of the lecture available.
I think podcasts ought to be posted as soon as the material is available. Let the students use it (or not use it) as they see fit. They'll soon figure out what works for them.
David
It matters only who-foots the bill. (Score:1, Insightful)
I find being the person who pays the bill works best.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting story. I had an 8:00 AM Microbiology class whose professor insisted on not only taking attendance but also having assigned seating... for a 500 person lecture class. To make sure you weren't tardy, every day he would have silly little thought questions for people in groups (determined by the seating arrangement) to solve and/or quizzes. To accomplish all this, he had a team of about 15 TAs that facilitated everything. All together, attendance accounted for 15% of your total grade.
Suffice it to say that I'm not a morning person and have always had a knack for microbiology anyway, so I was rarely present. I would review the material the week before the exams and made A's on them all. About halfway through the semester, when I was taking my third exam--I kid you not--the professor stood over my desk the entire time, watching me take the test. I can only guess that he thought I was cheating somehow--that there could be no other way to ace his intro-level material without attending. LOL
The more I think about it, there's a reason why the tests were so easy: because he spent half the allotted class time obsessing about attendance. In the time it took for him to orchestrate all of those quizzes and attendance rolls, we could've been covering more material. And what about the TAs? The class had to be ridiculously expensive to administer if they were paid.
For large classes, I just don't get the point of even beginning to worry about attendance. Education should be about the knowledge gained, not gratification for the professors or some rite of passage in the form of an 8:00 AM pop quiz. Furthermore, I've seen too many mediocre students use attendance grades as a prop for their low test scores. I say post the podcasts, and if nobody shows up to class just do what any upset teacher has a right to do; make the tests harder.
-Grym
Post the lectures with no authentication at all (Score:3, Insightful)
And post them immediately after the lecture takes place.. bad students are going to be bad students, and it's not your job in college to coddle them to get them to do their work. They have to take some responsibility for themselves. If you post them late (ie. a class,week,etc. behind) then you're only inconveniencing "good" students who happen to miss a class due to illness/etc. (ie. if you miss a class, the next class doesn't make a lot of sense if it built on the previous one.. )
University Students = Adults (Score:3, Insightful)
The ability for independent study is the one major skill universities should cultivate, and for that students should have some responsability over their own educational process. Isn't it better to encourage and enable them?
It is not the business of a university to make students attend classes. It's business is to educate, and attendance only has merit as one among many means towards that agenda. I'd guess this obsession with attendance and pedagogic hand-holding originally came from elementary or high-school system, where the goal of the school has more to do with the loco parentis than with any real education. But it really has no place in adult education.
A "bad student" is not going to start cramming the whole semester before the final just because the podcasts are there... they have been doing this since academic tests have existed, and if anything, video is evidently less efficient (time-wise) than the old all-nighter-with-the-books.
Of course, some teachers try to 'solve' this problem with artificial methods: keeping the chapters that matter secret outside the lecture, changing focus and topics between periods to prevent note-trading, giving attendance weight in the academic grade, or other ways to make being able to pass a reward for being in class.
This is just putting obstacles in the learning process of the students for the sake of solving a non-issue, taking away resources (clear notes and syllabus, lecture material, etc) for an agenda that is not their education.
It solves nothing and makes the availability of these resources at least partially moot. Your "good" students are penalized by going through a hassle for this and losing the flexibility this could have provided. Your "bad" students get to sleep in your class (or disturb it in boredom).
Both groups are going to study in their own ways anyway, and both should be evaluated identically based on their comprehension of the material and excercise of any applicable skills.
Truancy!? High School or Uni? (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at it this way, if enough students are "truant," those oversized lecture halls might shrink down a bit so that real learning can take place. I can only see this as a good thing. Let the lazy people stay home. Nobody wants them there anyway.
-matthew
Re:Why attendance may be necessary (Score:1, Insightful)
In fact, except for one exceptional professor, I would instantly drop any class where attendance was mandatory for two reasons. First, be interesting enough to make me want to come to class. A good professor can make the most boring stuff absorbing and a bad prof can make the most interesting material mind-numbingly dull. Ive had both and taken many classes just because of the prof teaching.
Second, it offends my sensibilities to pay money to have terms dictated to me. When you pay my salary, you can tell me what hours to work and where to show up when. When I pay yours dont expect to dictate terms. I cant even imagine going to a school that cost 40k+ a year and being told if I miss 3 classes I fail. The very idea is insane.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:3, Insightful)
The number of professors I have had where it's best to just ignore what the professor says in lecture and read the book or study on your own from various sources is amazing. I had a networking professor who would seriously tell you incorrect things during class, and then the exams would contradict what he had said (and agree with the book instead). Luckily for us, we argued him out of most of the questions where he had taught incorrectly.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:3, Insightful)
I was talking to Dr. Sadoway [mit.edu] at MIT about exactly this the other day. If you raise your hand in lecture, he'll throw you out. But recitations (1 hour, 2 or 3 times a week, with a TA, in classroom-sized instead of lecture hall-sized groups) are entirely Q&A sessions. He posts videos of the lecture and doesn't care if you don't show up - there's no interaction anyway, and so many people show up that he doesn't feel the loss of students. He said one student would use the video lectures entirely, because those allow pausing and rewinding the difficult parts.
If you're talking about a class that's taught somewhat interactively, then this may not work. But if you're talking about a large one-way lecture, go ahead and post the lectures immediately. There's no harm to the learning process at all, if you're going to be sitting for an hour and watching the professor talk anyway.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely, once you understand the language that we use to talk about language (heh), reading a book is probably the best way to learn the technical parts of the language, especially grammar. That's pure knowledge.
Being able to understand the spoken and written language quickly and easily, and to express oneself in that language in a like manner, is a skill. Practice and repitition of a skill is necessary in order to learn it, and in the case of language, this is best done with the aid of a mentor or teacher.
Many, many things that are taught in the classroom would be learned at least as efficiently through simply reading up on the topic. It may be a bit more work, but it should yield noticably better results (you have to really understand simple calculus, for example, before you can move on to the more advanced stuff, as you won't have a teacher to use as a crutch while you're studying the harder material)
As for students not reading assigned texts: there's a very good reason for this. It is because many professors just teach the exact same thing in lecture that the book taught, without skipping anything (or, at least, anything that will be on the test) or assuming knowledge of the material in the book. Result? Reading the book and then attending the lecture is damn boring. If you read, though, you still need to go to the lecture, because there will be a handful of things mentioned that weren't in the reading at all, and that'll be on the test.
So, it makes no sense in this case to read the material, because it, along with all the info that's not in the book, *will be covered in the lecture anyway*. Reading the material is a good way to make the lecture even more excruciating, for no gain whatsoever.
I'm sure that there are lots of professors who don't do this, but there are enough that do that it trains many students into this behavior. If they already had themselves trained to it, then this does nothing to break them of it (why should they start reading the book if they don't need to AND don't want to?) It doesn't excuse all cases like this, as a good number are surely pure laziness on the part of the student, but it's a BIG part of the problem.
Worst of all, it even discourages those who would normally read the text even without a grade incentive, because the repetition of the same material (not just discussion of it, which would be good, but rote repitition) in the lecture actually acts as a disincentive.
If your goal is to get the student to read the material, repeating it word-for-word in class is actually worse than not ever talking about it at all!
Re:MOD PARENT UP!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Many, many classes at a given university are not like that at all.
In order for, say, a history class to be worthwhile, you need either
A) informed discussion of written material that draws heavily upon the superior knowledge of your professor (who is, hopefully, much better-read than the students) or
B) original communication from the professor, that has not yet been put down on paper (or, at least, not widely published) and is also worth learning (the prof's pet theory about some particular author probably DOES NOT count)
B is very rare these days, and can be considered nonexistant at the undergrad level for all practical purposes.
A is less rare, but far less common than it should be. It requires small class sizes, which aren't the norm at many universities, and especially in lower-level classes.
I would go as far as to say that, for most majors and at most universities, roughly 2 years worth of a 4-year bachelor's degree could be more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently learned through simple reading, with ZERO interaction with professors.
For many majors, it's very nearly the whole four years that would be better devoted to just reading the right material.
Yes, classes in addition to the reading would be great, but the classes should augment the reading, NOT the other way around. The point of the classes should be to help you get more out of the reading more quickly than you could on your own, not just to teach you every damn thing out of a given book when you can read it yourself for free (assuming a nearby library has a copy).
Hands-down the most valuable thing that I've learned at my university is that, for probably 75% of the stuff taught here (not just in my majors, but in ALL of them) at the undergrad level, I can read the material and teach it to myself better than I can learn it from some professor who's just telling me what the book says. For that discovery alone, I see my time here as having been worthwhile.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It matters only who. (Score:2, Insightful)
it depends on what "a successful education" means (Score:3, Insightful)
But is this a successful and complete education? On one level I understand what you're saying, and I understand the primary reason for going to university is to get a piece of paper which says you have the qualification. I take your point that 'learning the material' is probably the most important measure but heck, it's troublesome. Clearly for you "passing exams" is a significant part of your definition of "being educated". Sounds like your college needs to carefully examine its teaching methods, it could be in danger of turning out a bunch of trained monkeys. It may have an excellent system, and set really well designed tasks for you, so maybe all is fine, but declaring that its possible for a student to succeed in their university education without any contact with their fellow students or the teaching staff raises some fundamental issues. Mind you I think there is discussion going on about this at the moment, with more and more courses being put online. Maybe a university is just about accreditation? Though your comment about lecturers having horrible foreign accents suggests that a little bit of cultural exposure might also be useful for you.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:1, Insightful)
Take advantage of technology to leverage whatever teaching skills the professor has and increase the ways students may benefit from those skills. That a Professor may know his subject is no reason to presume he should exert control over his students choices.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having once been in academia myself, I can tell you that MANY professors would rather you indulge their sense of self-importance than master the actual material.
-Eric
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer: It depends... (Isn't that always the answer?)
...upon how the student learns and what the instructor is trying to teach.
Everyone learns differently. Depending upon which study or promotion you believe there are between 3 and 36 basic learning styles [google.com]. At a minimum there is visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Since I learn visually, a podcast would be brutal for me, and most lectures are difficult, unless the instructor used visuals well. At some point I had to learn to 'translate' from something like a podcast or boring lecture to pictures - either in my mind or in my notes.
Still, I skipped ~35% of all of my engineering lectures, because of my preference. I went to my senior dam design class twice (almost getting kicked out the second time because my professor didn't know who I was) and earned an A. Unfortunately, I had to re-calculate a half dozen formulas that my 800 page manual had wrong. Had I been in class the handouts would have corrected this. I also would have learned less had I been in class!
The other side of the coin is what an instructor is trying to teach - and I'm not just talking about the subject matter that you can get in a book. The most important thing I learned from an engineering school is how to engineer. The best classes were the ones where the professor made a mistake 30 minutes ago and had to go back and find it, and where a student asked a question that stumped the instructor.
As a tutor and instructor myself, a good portion of time is used in teaching a student how to learn. For example, if a student came in with a question about his MS Office class (no Gates comments please), I would spend most of my time teaching him how to read the book. Technical and semi-technical computer books are impossible to read if you don't know how. I almost never answered the question directly. This frustrated students at first, but they thanked me later for it, and many times did not need any more tutoring. Another student came to me with a Psychology question, so I taught her how to use the index of her book and read in context to find the answer for herself.
Lecturing is different from tutoring, but I found myself still needing to teach students how to learn. I taught a basic math class at a community college. 40% of the students were there because they had forgotten the material (over 40 years old), 50% didn't learn it in high school (under 20 years old), 5% had to take it as a prerequisite, and 10% had no clue how to add percents. I felt this was part of my responsibility to teach some learning skills, since they were paying to learn something that they had no tools to get and retain the knowledge properly. As a result, I had pop quizzes and random homework checks to encourage class participation, and had mini group projects. From this, the better students were able to help the poorer students, and some of the poorer students improved in their learning.
I viewed it as my responsibility to encourage both the good and poor students to come to class - good students to help during class discussion; poor students so I could teach them how to learn better. Ultimately, it is the students' responsibility to learn and do the work. The level of your students, how they learn, the content of the class, your teaching style, and the needs that arise all go into determining whether students need to come to class.
So to answer the original question: First, I would setup a simple, optional password to allow students to get the podcasts, either a per lecture password or per class password. I would set up a structure that allows the instructor to setup when the podcast is available, and if a password is needed, and the frequency of the password. This allows them to direct how to use this tool is used, and covers his responsibility. Students would talk to the ins
Re:it depends on what "a successful education" mea (Score:3, Insightful)
Why shouldn't it be? I understand that learning to pass examinations and learning a subject are far from the same thing, but what has being in a particular room at a particular time got to do with anything, particularly if you can see everything you'd have seen in that room later, exactly as in the original (but with the helpful extra capability to pause or rewind)?
Or it was just telling it like it is, rather than pandering to political correctness and pretending that someone whose English is inaudible/incomprehensible is as good a lecturer as someone whose English is clear and readily understood.
Discrimination on the basis of race is usually inappropriate. Discrimination on the basis of not being able to speak English properly, while doing a job that fundamentally requires the ability to do so, is entirely justified.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyways, my wife is in medical school and this is absolutely how it is done. They immediately post every single lecture as mp3 audio. No video, which makes it a little different (maybe better?). It may be a little different for undergrads, but come on, college means self-responsibility. If a student chooses not to attend lecture, it's their loss. Sometimes it can be a gain - I have absolutely known people who will skip certain profs because their presentation is so terrible that it is actually detrimental to the learning process.
Re:Why does it matter if they come to class? (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, the really arbitrary rules are generally optional. These rules tend to apply to commas, hyphens, and word order. Even spelling can be flexible when multiple traditions developed separately (as in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia) But it's to everyone's benefit to have as much agreement as possible, and it is to your particular benefit (if only occasionally) to know and use the most common spellings. Try looking up "grammer" and "grammar" in Wikipedia sometime.
But when there are plain, hard-and-fast rules, it is simply ignorance or laziness to not follow them. Pluralization and the use of apostrophes in contractions are such cases. It has never been correct to write "its" in place of "it is", or "it's" to indicate that a thing belongs to some "it". If you stop and think about it, it's clear which to use -- and your writing becomes that much more readable.
As it is, people who actually know the difference see these errors and write off the writer as lazy, whereas people who do not know the difference will not care. It's the same philosophy behind wearing clean clothes and not smelling bad. You can argue that these things are irrelevent to whether people ought to take you seriously, but that's kind of beside the point. (OK, OK, some will say that it's actually the same philosophy behind using the right fork at dinner, but I tend to equate that more with writing "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux" when writing somewhere RMS might see.)
I highly recommend the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss. It's pedantic as hell, but entertaining and informative. Possibly persuasive, too