If you're not willing to take the initiative on your own to do what you need to do to learn the material for a class you're taking, then you shouldn't be complaining if you haven't learned the material when the course is over.
When you're taking a course, it is literally someone's job to answer your questions.
When you're teaching a class of 50+ students, your primary job is to lecture them. Two-way interaction is usually reserved for office hours.
If you're not enrolled in a course, you would need a patient friend who is an expert in the subject, an extremely patient acquaintance who is an expert, or an expert tutor. All of those are hard to come by.
Only because learning by watching online lectures currently is not a common method of learning (because the technology necessary for it to be possible has only recently become available). If it were to become more common, these resources would certainly be more readily available. The tutors would also be held to more exacting standards, since there would be competition. At a traditional university, for a given semester for a given course, you're usually forced to select from 1 or 2 professors, whom you can only indirectly evaluate for their performance after the course has ended. But with tutors, you would be free to pick whoever you wanted.
Also, most of these professors' primary job is their research, not teaching. The tutors would be focused on teaching, and would thus do a better job of it. Being a good researcher in a field means almost nothing when it comes to teaching undergraduate level material. Some of the professors I've had have been some of the smartest people I've ever met, but their communication & teaching skills have been nothing short of appalling.
Further, I rarely give straight answers to my student's questions. Their question is usually a symptom of a deeper misunderstanding, and figuring out what that is, and leading them to understand that, is my real job. Someone who just says "The answer is X" does not serve the same role as a teacher.
Competition that would result from the ability to cherry-pick personal tutors for each course would naturally eliminate those who did a poor job of teaching their students, so that wouldn't be an issue either.
> When you're teaching a class of 50+ students, your primary job is to lecture them. Two-way interaction is usually reserved for office hours.
It seems like this will be the first thing to go. Without participation, there's no advantage to attending the lecture over watching the recording. Professors already expect you to come to class having read the textbook; perhaps soon they'll expect you to come to class having watched the lecture online.
If you're not willing to take the initiative on your own to do what you need to do to learn the material for a class you're taking, then you shouldn't be complaining if you haven't learned the material when the course is over.
When you're taking a course, it is literally someone's job to answer your questions.
When you're teaching a class of 50+ students, your primary job is to lecture them. Two-way interaction is usually reserved for office hours.
If you're not enrolled in a course, you would need a patient friend who is an expert in the subject, an extremely patient acquaintance who is an expert, or an expert tutor. All of those are hard to come by.
Only because learning by watching online lectures currently is not a common method of learning (because the technology necessary for it to be possible has only recently become available). If it were to become more common, these resources would certainly be more readily available. The tutors would also be held to more exacting standards, since there would be competition. At a traditional university, for a given semester for a given course, you're usually forced to select from 1 or 2 professors, whom you can only indirectly evaluate for their performance after the course has ended. But with tutors, you would be free to pick whoever you wanted.
Also, most of these professors' primary job is their research, not teaching. The tutors would be focused on teaching, and would thus do a better job of it. Being a good researcher in a field means almost nothing when it comes to teaching undergraduate level material. Some of the professors I've had have been some of the smartest people I've ever met, but their communication & teaching skills have been nothing short of appalling.
Further, I rarely give straight answers to my student's questions. Their question is usually a symptom of a deeper misunderstanding, and figuring out what that is, and leading them to understand that, is my real job. Someone who just says "The answer is X" does not serve the same role as a teacher.
Competition that would result from the ability to cherry-pick personal tutors for each course would naturally eliminate those who did a poor job of teaching their students, so that wouldn't be an issue either.
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