I studied film (and have a Master of Arts thanks to that) – so yes – you are right. But I don't see why as an educator you would have to create everything yourself. There is a lot of good existing stuff. And if there isn't, you don't need to create a masterpiece. It would be enough if you think about what to say and what not to say in a limited timeframe (as opposed to improvising for an hour).
And I never said chitchat isn't okay. I clearly said that this is part of why people do it. We have to realise that people sit at home, and can get very easily distracted. If you are an educator your goal should be to counter that by creating a clear structure. Let's say: 15mins of focused introduction, 20 mins on free chitchat, then watching a video collectively, then discussion about it, etc. This is what successful educators in our university do. If you don't structure it (e.g. I witnessed 4 hours of unstructured chitchat), you are exhausting everyone, and they would have gained more from just watching one youtube video on the topic.
For me it's less about content than missing out on real conversation about difficult topics.
I know this isn't everyone's experience but I started undergrad at a small state school in Denver, and had great diverse interactions in philosophy and literature courses because of how many different walks of life people came from.
It's hard to have honest and deep conversations on video. I don't think many would contest that.
Maybe it's not just video though. I feel we're lacking the social tools to deal with our situation, something educators could perhaps provide.
I never said watching lectures would be enough. I think it can be a combination of videos, discussion, collaboration, creation, and sharing. Think of the communities that form around YouTube channels. It's more than just the videos, it's the comments and response videos, subscribers, and followers that make it interesting.
Video _should_ take over from lectures, but there needs to be a model to properly replace it. On my part, I think it's an utter waste of the teacher's time to keep repeating the same lecture over and over, when he/she should be doing exactly the conversation and engagement part. It's just we don't have a good, universal model for this. I'm sure lots of places tried and succeeded, but for some reason no particular way of skinning this cat got out to become well known.
Partly, I suspect, is because 80% of the value of education is signaling, so any "revolution in teaching" would be just optimizing the 20% left.
I dont' know about getting rid of lectures. on the one hand, I think just being talked to formally for 90 minutes absolutely sucks. But it's not going to be better on video. Plus maybe it helps you discipline for uninteresting things. I like group work and discussion based stuff, however there's a limit because I want the person who knows what the are talking about giving most of the points, not the person who wants to be class clown or waste my time in an expensive course.
Group work, or actually working while being able to ask questions is pretty cool. It can always be better for any particular person but it's never going to be perfect, so best to just keep steering it in the right direction.
I do agree that the lectures should be recorded and available. Otherwise it's just lost to the ether when the educator quits or dies. And I need to hear things a few times before the importance sticks.
The problem is most lessons are already broadcast only. When you have 30 students in class, it's very hard to take a individual approach. Yes I agree the individual approach is better.
But have you considered that videos, when dealing with a class of 30 is actually more individual.
A individual student can pause, rewind etc for his own needs. Where as in a class he could not do this. You can't rewind a teacher, if anything the teacher could get angry.
If anything this allows more time for tutoring, rather than lecturing. Allowing the teacher more time for one on one work.
I think this significantly misses the point of higher education. By far the most valuable parts are 1) peer interaction, and 2) lecturer-audience interaction.
I learned way more from discussing the topic with my classmate during breaks than I ever did from the course material itself. Learning a fact is easy, deeply understanding it is not - and discussing it with your peers is the best way to discover each others' flaws in understanding.
In addition to this, people asking questions is a crucial part of the lecture. Sometimes a question is because someone was asleep during the previous lecture, but most of the times it was because a concept was not explained clearly. And in a few rare but valuable cases someone asked a question, and the lecturer's eyes lit up as someone had rediscovered an open research problem - or made a critical link between two seemingly unrelated topics.
Textbooks and videos can teach you a lot, but they do not allow for interaction. If you wish to simply get a basic understanding of a well-known topic, that might be enough. But if you want to truly master it and perhaps even contribute to advancing it yourself, it simply isn't enough.
But then how could the students watching the recorded video ask questions of the lecturer? There are many problems with the way higher education is delivered, but i doubt video is the answer. There needs to be some sort of recognition and employment position created within academic institutions that doesn't punish academics because they enjoy teaching. Video lessons are not really that solution when you consider that this issue (lack of effective teachers at tertiary level and lack of encouragement for academic staff to be good teachers) is one primarily born out of the greed of academic institutions.
True, but Q&A makes up a tiny fraction of most lectures I've attended, and attention span can be improved by shortening the duration of each lecture.
However, I'd agree that lack of dynamic peer interaction is a big problem with video-based instruction that hasn't yet been fixed. I've seen attempts to address this like Piazza where students can post questions or answer others', but text-based forums lack graphical or temporal cues that many concept demand. Maybe some sort of multiuser video supplement might help, where the question poser could snip the time mark of a puzzling section from the lecture or an illustration from another video and refer to it in source so others could visualize with a click the point being asked?
Also I'd say you _can_ pause a lecture. Simply lift up your hand and ask a question: That's the great thing about person-to-person teaching.
Painting all lectures and meetings as 'broken' because one would prefer to have video for everything (that's how I understood it) is pretty hyperbolic.
If lectures are only treated as talking heads, you might have a valid point. However, I think lectures ideally involve a lot of interaction between students and the lecturer which you can't get with pre-recorded material.
They do! I would know :) the problem isn't even the length, the problem is in the performance, the presentation, how cohesive the information is to a new learner.
If an instructor plays a video in class, it doesn't work well. "Why are we here again?".
If the video is assigned, then its ignored because students have to pay on the private loans that pay you. They have to optimize their life because late stage capitalism and government obesity is squeezing the life out of the younger generation. It's human nature but it's often ignored in favor of easy explanations. If you disagree then simply listen to the conversations students have when they think nobody is listening.
The solution, which can be gained by asking any successfully educator (rarely professors), is this - you are a content creator. If you don't know how to play that role, then you can't educate well.
The whole purpose of an instructor is to take difficult concepts and make them easier for the human ape brain to understand. We do this by leveraging visual recognition, memory, and social behaviors.
For example an instructor that presents good information with a poor performance will result in poor communication of that information. This is so common I could walk into a classroom and example it right now.
The problem can only be solved by competition with the existing orgs. There are far better methods, and you can find them if you search.
Whoa whoa whoa, WHAT? Historian, cook, screen writer, journalist, director? On what planet can directorial skills be conveyed via a lecture video clip? Did CalArts, which graduated Tim Burton, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Joe Ranft, and countless other masters of animation do so simply by showing them what amounted to the same stock lectures with some automated method of remote feedback? Or was it instead significantly in part a communal learning experience that involved peer criticism and one on one tutelage from professors who were in the room with them as they drew and developed their craft?
I'm sorry, but believe it or not, not all professional skills can be remotely acquired without a kind of human transference of intangible, personable skills. Education in higher academia is about much more than the acquisition of particular facts--it's a culture, practice, and way of life. Critical ideas are meant to be discussed in person, ruminated on, and debated in real, highly dynamic discussions. Real life work environments, especially in software companies, are ones in which critical, GROUP brainstorming dynamics are particularly important, because oftentimes the answer doesn't lie in the answer key in the back of the book, but rather as a result of a group process of rumination, guess, check, and revision.
Sure, let's talk it out together. So I think that #1 may as well be, "pay the best teachers extra to record their lectures and have them for years to come." Universities do this. It's worthwhile. We should probably do that!
But I'm not sure it replaces anything that exists (I'm not sure you argued this!). A core reason we have teachers and not a TV screen is because they can organically read the room and adjust the lesson plan in real time. That feedback loop is constantly ongoing even if you never noticed it.
I don't want to jump too far through the experiment but I think the conclusion is the same: any good idea is really just, "we need to do more." So if the argument is that we can do more with the same resources, I fear it's because we fail to grok what those resources are actually doing today.
<i>There can be great value in personal interaction. I agree that big lectures like described should and will die off. However, the fastest way to learn anything is to have a series of conversations with an expert. (I guess that could still be reproduced by videochat or something...) I understand this has long been the model in many UK schools.</i>
The long conversations with an expert are purely an Oxbridge thing, it costs waaay too much to do that for it to be worthwhile for students with less potential/no tradition of doing so.
I see what you're saying about the quiz questions every few minutes.
On the other hand, she's not arguing for limiting ourselves to video lectures. Her point (see page 2) is that class time is precious and shouldn't be wasted on lecturing but on problem solving, critical thinking, and discussion, and this I totally agree with. (Why is it taking institutions so long to figure this out?)
Too terse. It turns out that some points cannot be made in one Tweet, just as other points cannot be made in seven minutes.
And you need to be a bit more generous to those who still admire fine old art forms like the classic long lecture. It is a genre. It used to be the genre, and now it is just one, but the masters of the big lecture were and are great, and a lot of them aren't going to master the new genre - they were born too late, perhaps - so enjoy them for what they are. Use the high-speed button if you must.
All that said: Yes, you're right, the central awesomeness of Khan is not Khan himself or his lectures - people have rightly pointed out that Khan isn't the teacher to end all teachers - but his relentless pushing of this new genre, a genre that relies on the presence of ubiquitous handheld portable video players. In a world where everyone on the bus and in line at the supermarket has a smartphone, a traditional lecture, with lots of throat-clearing and repetition and class mechanics ("before I tell you anything useful let me talk about the TA assignments") and a long recap at the start of every lecture to let the people who slept through the last lecture catch up... it's tedious. Cut out half of it, deliver the rest in chunks, build a replay system that makes it easy to navigate to and play the individual chunks, and suddenly you're in the 21st century. I've been waiting for this to happen ever since I first used YouTube, and countless YouTube teachers have pioneered the technique; Khan is finally doing the evangelization.
I keep wishing, probably in vain, that TV would go the same way. I put off watching Mythbusters for years because I just couldn't stand the editing: shows are edited for people who tune in and out constantly, so every five minute chunk has one minute of pure review of stuff you just saw ten minutes ago, two minutes of new material intercut with one minute's worth of stuff that you have already seen, and thirty seconds of previews for things that you will see fifteen minutes from now.
The value is the interaction. I try to have a discussion about the topic. You can read all about it on the website, but here's where I can ask you questions to see if you get it and we can discuss and clarify.
(Now, I grant you, in a room of 300, interaction is severely limited. I'm lucky my classes tend to have fewer than 20 people.)
If I give a lecture that you could have just watched a video of, I fell short.
I agree lectures are a waste of time. I'm imagining conferences when I think of this.
While I enjoy seeing a good presentation live I've mostly realized I can just watch the recording later. Of course I want to meet others between presentations/lectures but the lectures themselves can be more easily consumed on youtube at 2x speed and more easily skipped if the first 5-10mins make it relatively clear it's unlikely to be a good lecture/presentation.
A meeting on the other hand, actually discussing things, at least in my situations the notebook is required as reference for things in the discussions. If it's really just a lecture held in a meeting room (no discussion) then it seems like a waste of time.
The original article seems to be about lectures at school. Wasn't Khan Academy kind of founded on the principle that lectures are bad schooling? IIRC the suggestion was that lecture material should be something watched at home and classroom time should be for getting help with the material.
Definitely agree, but with the caveat that the teaching occurs after a period of doing. If I learn something by doing it, and then attempt to teach it, I may dwell in the "Why" of it when otherwise I might not have. But if someone listens, and then lectures, that is no better than a video.
And I never said chitchat isn't okay. I clearly said that this is part of why people do it. We have to realise that people sit at home, and can get very easily distracted. If you are an educator your goal should be to counter that by creating a clear structure. Let's say: 15mins of focused introduction, 20 mins on free chitchat, then watching a video collectively, then discussion about it, etc. This is what successful educators in our university do. If you don't structure it (e.g. I witnessed 4 hours of unstructured chitchat), you are exhausting everyone, and they would have gained more from just watching one youtube video on the topic.
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