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Comment by two2two | Hacker News Reader

> Fortunately, Christensen says that there is one thing that online education will not be able to replace. In his research, he found that most of the successful alumni who gave generous donations to their alma maters did so because a specific professor or coach inspired them.

This is still my argument for in-person lectures. Online classes are okay, but the insights gained from the unexplainable passion presented through oration provides unparalleled value to one's motivation and internal framework.

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Lectures from professors who are supremely skilled at pedagogy are great. Lucky students will have only a handful of those in their academic careers. These can, however, be recorded. It might not be as electrifying as the real thing, but the real thing is so rare.

There are other activities that simply can't be done alone, however: laboratory classes, recitations and interactions where the students engage at a personal level with professors, TA's and other students. This is how students develop relationships that they carry with them past their time in academia.

There is room, I think, for a hybrid approach. A combination of online learning with some kind of periodic on-site and in-person practicum. This drastically lowers the cost of the education, but still engages students on a personal level.

One of my CS professors used the "flipped classroom" technique. He would assign the readings and expect them to be done by the time of the scheduled class. Then we would jointly do exercises and collaborate on the topics that were touched upon in the readings. He was ruthless if it was obvious you hadn't done the reading. It was effective.

I think one or two days a week for 2 hours is the perfect amount of lab/in-person collaboration time. Combined with an online forum for questions and video lectures, that would be an ideal course of instruction for me.

I'd love to see a teacher apply how modern influencers approach media. Gary Vaynerchuk is an extreme example. Create a lecture, put it online. Then create 5x10 second soundbites of the most meaningful parts. Then create meme+quotes to be shared. Then create some GIFs of you being animated with caption text. Then read all the comments and create a second round of media if people are resonating with any other pieces.

They would need to think through the recording setup and cant just put a wide angle on the powerpoint and call it a day.

That sounds like a technology problem. As in, as the technology gets better, you’d be able to have that same experience online.

I'm currently a senior in college. The number of lecturers I would consider "good" (or better) at lecturing is small. I've had probably ~30 lecturers at this point. Of those, <=5 are >=good.

And I don't know what your experience has been, but the majority of the good/excellent lecturers I had in college were actually TAs & low end adjunct or associate professors, not the preeminent tenured research professors.

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