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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure most instructors would, if they had a choice, cut lectures and just have discussion sections/labs. But this would require that everybody read the book and come to the discussion sections ready to engage.

Lectures seem more like a failure-mode that has somehow become the standard. Assume the students won’t read, and have a human take the book’s job. Humans are… not great books.

It is weird that video-lectures+in person discussion sections didn’t become the standard by, like, 2010 or so.

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The lecture style appears to come from a time before the printing press when access to information was poor, enabling students to be essentially human photocopiers to copy the material to bring back to the home for the rest of the family to learn from.

Seems we still do it because we have a love of tradition.

YMMV, which is kind of the entire point here. Personally I found lectures to be a great way to learn, given the right teacher. A big key for me was to stop taking notes so that I could actually focus on what was being said instead. Another was, for lack of a better word… humanity. Video lectures just don't capture me the same way at all.

I always had to take notes, still do, if I want to be able to focus on the speaker. Something about how I process speech.

I'm very skeptical about the "there are no learning styles" results.

The idea is that it is unlikely that individuals can be neatly categorized into one specific learning style among of set of learning styles. What allows one to learn best is highly contextual and ever changing.

This wouldn't work well in my engineering classes unfortunately. Sure you might follow along better, but then you'd have no example problems to study and would be screwed when it came time to study for the test.

Wasn't there a math prof that did exactly that? Can't find the link now, but after some getting used to the results were overwhelmingly positive.

TBH, just staying at home and watching YouTube videos (on the same topics) is likely better than sitting in the average lecture, even if students don't want to read at all...

>TBH, just staying at home and watching YouTube videos (on the same topics) is likely better than sitting in the average lecture, even if students don't want to read at all...

Good luck getting the students to watch the videos.

When I started college in 2009, most large classes were videotaped and posted online within a day or two. Still had to show up for discussion and small lectures but at least those usually involved more student engagement

Yeah, especially since COVID that seems to be popular. But, it doesn’t really lessen the workload on the instructor. IMO it would be better to just take the “best hits” video lectures from the last couple years, give those to the students, don’t do lectures at all, and then focus 100% on discussion sections (which really benefit more from the personal touch). But, for some social reason or something, this wouldn’t fulfill student expectations.

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