Comment Re:Do Not Want (Score 1) 329
One of my first lecturers at the university said that the traditional lectures are the worlds worst Xerox-machine. One guy standing by the blackboard and 200+ students copying everything verbatim.
In his classes we got all the slides he used at the beginning of the course, so we had no need to copy everything down. Most of the time the topics were covered in the textbook, but if he chose to cover material that wasn't in the textbook, it was in the hand-outs. The notes I took in those classes were mainly writing down some extra words on a slide printout if I thought something could use extra clarification.
I don't see *why* the lectures should give you something that is *only* available to those attending the lectures. The lectures might give a different angle on the same subject, but essentially everything you need should be in the material you are already given. (Why on earth should the professor withhold information from the students? Isn't s/he interested in them learning?) This way, lectures can focus on trying to explain that and allow the students to ask questions for clarification of that material. Since we were given hand-outs and slides for all the classes for the whole semester, I could easily browse through next class in advance to be more prepared and ask more relevant questions in class, improving my learning even further. Each lecture was followed up by a smaller class with a TA, digging deeper into the subject of the day and possibly preparing for a lab session.
Attendance in a class should not be a goal in itself, learning is the goal, and the classes should facilitate that.
This method of course requires the lecturers to prepare the classes well in advance. Not all lecturers seem to have the ability and focus to do that. I wonder why they require any more of the students then.
This class was one of the best I attended to at my university, and the following four years I returned as a TA in that class, teaching a total of six classes of EE and CS students. For me it set a standard of teaching which I still today find exemplary. (The course in question was modeled on MIT 6.001 but had gone through a number of revisions throughout the years.)