Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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