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Comment by Nebasuke | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a good point. I found the following sentences of the article shocking:

> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.

It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.

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Personally I always ask for lecture/presentation slides - it's common practice in computing and related fields. Technical conferences (be they industry-focused like Nvidia GTC or more research-focused like Usenix ATC) routinely provide presentation slides and recordings. Both are extremely valuable.

I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)

Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.

>The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)

This is massively true IMO. Taking detailed notes during a lecture is an absurd waste of attention - we have universally-available recording technologies. Use them.

They're used professionally too, and there's essentially zero chance that they'll go away, it's much more realistic to use them in classes. This is something that has changed with phones and computers becoming universal - college needs to adapt to it.

Use lecture time to do things you can't do with a recording: interact.

(Yes I'm thoroughly aware that student interaction is a myth and it pretty much never happens - I've zoned out in classes with attendance scores too. Except for those handfuls of classes that many people can remember where it does happen, those don't count and there's surely nothing special about them that is worth learning from)

Taking notes forces your brain to process the information in a way that just reading or listening doesn’t.

except you don't have time to do that in the moment, since you're busy scribbling down formulas trying to keep up

That isn't a justification; if the students think that it helps they can take notes of their own initiative; handing out a copy of the slides doesn't disadvantage anyone. The lecturers are just making a petty power play because they want to feel important standing in front of a bunch of eager young students

There simply isn't any pedagogical justification for withholding information post-lecture that was deemed important enough to be included in a lecture. Everyone knows this material is critical to understanding the course. If professors want simple optimisations to help students learn then they would be doing something like organising lecture material to promote spaced repetition.

It also means instead of listening youre busy writing down stuff in time before the next slide

You only have one language processing centre. You are either copying from the screen or listening to the professor, not both.

This is definitely how my brain works. I'm either absorbing words that are said, or I'm writing - when I multitask here, my retention plummets like a rock.

Shocker, that. Multitasking worsening performance? Surely that can't be a super-well-demonstrated-repeatedly phenomenon.

Does it? I once had a course where for some reason administration cut the course hours in half, without cutting the program. Teacher apologized in advance and asked us to take notes and read them at home later. After every lecture, I kid you not, I was lucky if I could remember the topic that was read to us. Absolutely no facts. It was lectures on topics I was slightly familiar with. And the speed of the lecture wasn't even as high (sic!) as the speed of some youtube lectures I have watched later.

You need to have time to process, but when you have to take notes there is a speed at which you just skip processing and instead all of your focus is in transcribing as efficiently as you can. I imagine, the speed differs from person to person. For the most of this course, the teacher hit this speed. And she knew she would hit it. So it seems universal.

If current student generation is worse at taking notes by hand, it could be a real disadvantage for them

I learned better when I took notes. I believe research backs that up.

Probably an obvious addendum here, but the classes I remember having the most engaging lectures were flipped style where you didn't need to take notes necessarily, because the class was about discussing and deepening the understanding of material you saw already. That was true for my physics classes as well as philosophy. I think it was doubled up in usefulness when we were assigned material that asked us to act on our deepened understanding soon, e.g. before the next class period, such as one of the many "opinion pieces" we wrote for things like dualism/monism, etc.

Technical subjects achieve this with labs, too. It doesn't scale but we see clearly that scaling isn't always very desirable, especially if it leads to this regression.

Having a copy of slides open during lecture is a total game-changer for technical classes.

You can follow along and keep 2-3 slides open at a time to have a better sense of the context, skip back to review an idea, screenshot and get clarification with AI, there are so many possibilities which enhance the lecture.

Some professors also write/diagram right on top of the slides and then provide them after class.

A lot of CS classes have switched to GitHub, with basically entirely open course materials.

Even on closed systems like Canvas, it's typically an entire library of content that you have access to.

I personally love lectures, but I'm also not doing a typical degree program, where I'd be forced to take 3-5 courses per semester. If I was under that much workload, I can't imagine having the time to absorb all the material, do all the work, sleep, and go to every lecture.

A professor's lecture notes would never be good notes for a student to learn from. They are simply reminders to the professor to talk about certain topics that they know the ins and outs of.

Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.

Agreed that the notes are usually not so great for learning from. But in this case the “notes” are actually the slides, which are explicitly intended to be consumed by the students.

Even so, a set if slides is a great reminder of whatever the professor talked about.

This is conflating written jots with information presented to the students.

The author is talking about PowerPoint slides that were presented to the students as valuable information.

I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.

The one course where I showed up to every class was a discussion class. It was on AI and each lecture was a 10 minute topic intro, 30 min of group discussion and research, and 10 min of presentations.

The courses I never attended a single class for were reading screenshots of a textbook.

Idk my fellow student didn’t have any more insight than I did. Without work experience it’s all theoretical

Theory is kind of the point thought. College isn’t/shouldn’t be just a job training program. That’s part of the problem.

Without experience you can’t ground theory into reality and you miss the critical details that actually make things work. For me interesting stuff happens in the implementation later between theory and dirty reality.

Pretty much everyone but the actual students agree that would be better. We can't do that since the students typically refuse to do the necessary prep.

I'm reminded of Amazon's meeting rule where the first 15 minutes are devoted to reading any documents because it's assumed no one did it ahead of the meeting. This is a problem in the workplace as well.

That's not entirely true at Amazon. It's expected for many of the more involved people in the meeting to read ahead of time, and at least be familiar with the subject.

At the same time, the time is given because not everyone will have time to read ahead of time. That 15 minutes at the start is their calendar block; think of managers who have back to back meetings all day.

It's not some referendum on people being careless.

Study groups were my replacement for this, but that requires a critical mass to get going.

> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.

Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.

The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.

In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.

The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.

Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.

Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.

I vaguely remember the philosophy classes I took oncr upon a time as all being lectures and then extensive papers for homework, with real discussion only happening in the 400-level ones around when I finally stopped taking them because the endless paper-writing rhetoric in circles was just terminally boring by that point.

That sounds like an abysmal philosophy education. Sorry you got that. The main purpose of a philosophy class is to read some material, engage with it critically in a guided dialogue in class time, and engage critically by yourself with it in written work. Straight lectures are basically going to wind up just being cliff's notes for a written source and are about as useful as any secondary source. The exception would be survey courses and intro ones, where the professor's choice of how to guide students through material can make an overwhelming task of exposing yourself to a lot of different thought into something manageable.

I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes.

I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.

It is not interactive because the professor has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter and thoughts, ideas and suggestions of the students are an order of magnitude less of less value than that of the professors.

Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.

It's much easier to learn if you can ask questions and try (and fail) to make your own connections, and this has nothing to do with whether or not your own ideas and suggestions have any merit of their own.

I don't engage in class to show off or try to contribute, but because it's an incredibly valuable part of the learning process for me.

Questions are fine, unless they end up being a substitute for not preparing for class.

As a professor I had once put it, "This is difficult material. I don't expect you to understand it from just one lecture. You need to read the material before the lecture, but it will only be after you've struggled with the problem sets that I would expect you to understand it."

A class that is not interactive then doesn't have to be a class. It could be a book or a set of slides with an audio narration and that'd have the same result.

Teachers that can only read their notes and write stuff on a board without ever interacting are of the most useless kind. They're completely replaceable by course material.

Agreed, when I was at uni a few years ago, having the lecture slides was a handy reference EVEN when I wrote my own notes during lectures.

One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.

Yeah I don't get that statement at all. How can a professor not just post their slides on their website? What exactly is so special about their slides?

I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.

in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.

The physical act of having to take notes helped me understand and remember them. Being given a handout doesn't work that well.

Nobody is stopping anyone from taking notes during class. Even you should appreciate the slides because they’d give you an opportunity to review before big exams and make sure you didn’t miss anything.

> This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.

I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes.

But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.

> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time.

Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else.

I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).

100% agreed. When I was in Uni, I had a few lectures where going to the class was actually a waste of time for me (especially when I had to work on other time-consuming assignments) since I knew about the topic already. I passed those classes with high grades solely by going over the lecture slides.

Ha yep, I bumped on that too. Like, what? Post the slides for future reference, who cares? What an odd bugaboo.

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