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Classroom experience is so rarely useful, the ONLY time you benefit is when either a) you already studied the subject and the professor is good and mentions something tangential/extra credit, or b) the classroom size is small, so when you don't understand something you can say so without fear of class disruption and the teacher can spend more time tailoring their curriculum to their class.

Otherwise yes, you are often better off with the book and homework and actually completing both.

And this is where I usually go off on my rant how college is useless for education - you can 'learn' peer interaction but even this way nothing forces you to make friends or connections, so the inherent use is close to nill.

I can't say I agree with this. If there is anything I learned from COVID it is the value of in-person teaching.

I believe this may be true for you, but it is not true for me.

I find classrooms engaging and I actually internalise information in a way that reading is only ever surface level.

I don’t find classrooms particularly engaging, but an open book in front of me is even less so. Classrooms are basically the only way I get any not-immediately-interesting learning done.

It does depend what you're learning, too. Anything practical (chemistry lab skills, for example) will need a classroom. And languages probably do too.

(If you do Deaf Studies in Trinity College, University of Dublin, one of the lectures is on Deaf Culture, Perspectives on Deafness, Working with the Deaf Community. The lecturer is himself Deaf, and will lecture in ISL. There's an interpreter present to voice the lecture for the hearing students (and to interpret any questions, of course). In third year, you lose the interpreter. By that stage, you should be fluent enough in ISL from your ISL classes to no longer need one.)

It's wildly dependent on the topic.

I never went to my physics classes in college - there was no attendance requirement outside of lab and I saw no reason to since math and science were easy for me to grok on my own.

On the other hand, I also studied languages and classroom and face to face time is almost essential for in-depth language study. Language study isn't usually lecture based, though. Not going to my Chinese or Arabic classes would have been a bad time.

I had the luxury of going to Oxford, when colleges gave tutorials to two or three students at a time. For most topics, I figured out what had been covered in the lectures from the tutorial problems, read up that material in the book I was using, and then solved the tutorial problems.

There were a few topics that I attended the lectures, either because the lecturer was very good or because no book was adequate. The subject was mathematics, but I knew people from other fields who approached study in a similar way.

This is a super interesting strategy. Also going to classes can lead one into a false sense of mastery. It almost makes more sense to do homework before class, and attend lecture as a review. It would just become pre-work then and would essentially be considered mandatory. This would also really fix the problem of lectures not being useful, since the lecturer could assume you did the work and then spend more time on things that are a better use of their expertise.

> I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up.

This is a problem for everyone. People may not experience the struggle directly, but it's there. It's the inherent problem with any group class.

> I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand.

Tight loops of interaction will make this nearly impossible. What you'll have to watch out for instead is overwhelming students to the point of distress (speaking from experience).

Not only is this a problem with everyone, it's also one of the "soft" skills you learn to deal with in school. It occurs in professional and social interactions as well and school prepares for dealing with it.

> completely deprioritise classes in favour of homework and doing the reading in my own time

I had two mathematics teachers in high school that took this approach to class time. They would lecture for 10 minutes then have the class do work in groups on homework assignments for the remaining 45 minutes. Exact times varied based on the complexity of the material, of course. And I do not believe their format was sanctioned by the administration. But it sure helped me retain more of the information.

As an extra bonus, it really helped with procrastination. It was a lot easier to get to work on an already-started homework assignment compared to staring at a blank page and a daunting list of problems.

> I took this realisation to the extreme and decided to completely deprioritise classes in favour of homework and doing the reading in my own time. I figured the cost-benefit, at least for me, was much higher if I spent an hour doing as opposed to an hour listening.

That depends very much on the lecturer. If he or she just follows one book for the whole semester and doesn't add any additional insight, explanation of tradeoffs, or enlightening anecdotes, then by any means skip the lecture. But if you have a lecturer giving you all from above and the possibility to ask questions, lectures can be invaluable. Luckily I experienced many of the latter kind, although some of the first.

I think it's to do with the nature of tests. Exam questions in the mathy subjects are sort of two varieties in my experience. One is simply book proof: here's an equation, here's another one, plug one into the other and rearrange and there's this useful result. Come exam time, you just need to remember the steps and you get points.

You'll think you get it.

But there are questions that are about a deeper understanding. For these there's some point to the question that isn't obvious from just reading. I remember the first few question sheets I got in uni, there would be questions that appeared to have nothing to do with what was presented at all. Only by asking around did I discover what the cryptic connections were. If you don't do the question sheets, you won't see this.

>I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up.

Yes, this is my biggest gripe with learning as well. It's so individual that you almost need one teacher per student.

Finally, we have the "Digital Aristotle". KhanAcademy is testing out a ChatGPT integration.

Well, it was astonishing when I read the news. Now, at the end of this crazy week, all I can think is "well of course they are!"

From my experience both as a student and as a teacher (formal and informal settings; the formal ones in academia): Different people respond differently to different modes of teaching / exposure to information.

* Some only "get it" when it's explained to them in a classroom, preferably by an engaging teacher; while others have to read it in the book.

* Many, perhaps most, won't really get it unless they do the homework; but others can do all of the exercises you give them, and still fail to get the bigger picture, and will be lost if faced with something slightly different than what they exercised.

I did this when I accidentally enrolled in the astronomy 101 class for astronomers when I meant to enroll in the “fun” astronomy class for non-majors. The professor was extremely uninterested in teaching and I decided to just do the assignments and stop going to class. Still got an A.