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Comment by gchallen | Hacker News Reader

Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and students dislike it. Faculty like to talk and pretend they're teaching, and students like to listen and pretend they're learning.

All to say—I wish it was this easy to change the academy. But it's not.

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Good lectures are phenomenally useful, far better than individual unguided review of the material. They're often IME very interactive too.

STEM subjects are particularly hard to create good lectures for. And STEM expertise and speaking/communication skills don't always overlap either.

The non-STEM classes I learned the most in are the ones I learned the most in lecture in. The STEM classes, on the other hand, were pretty scattershot without as much correlation.

An LLM-based toolset could likely be much better than that and at least as good as bad lectures, but the guardrails are gonna need to be really really really good.

> Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever.

Mainly due to shortage of very good lecturers, no? I can not see a better way to cultivate the professional pride than to attend lectures of truly remarkable professors. The style, the manner, the attitude go much beyond the dry proofs. I'm an applied math major.

You're describing your response to a performance, not to a learning opportunity. Is it fun to watch a great performer? Sure. Is that an effective way to learn? No.

Does lecturing have a place in disseminating ideas? Sure. I love that scene from Oppenheimer when he attends Heisenberg's lecture, being exposed to cutting edge ideas directly from the mouth of a truly remarkable professor. Watching that gave me a better appreciation of lecturing's original purpose and historical importance. But that's very different from teaching well-understood concepts and skills.

I'm not sure about your experience but most of my professors would teach classes tangentially related to their field of expertise. So we were almost always exposed to the "well-understood concepts and skills" alongside what was cutting edge in their niche at the time.

It was subtle, but easy enough to pick up on if you were being attentive in class..

> Is that an effective way to learn? No.

Sorry, but I must disagree. There is much more to learning process than just the material itself. We are social animals, so the emotional aspect matters to the majority of us. Highly technical fields are not an exception. The attitude of the lecturer and his reaction to the questions from the audience, sidetrack discussions -- it all counts. At least to me and the people I have known.

At the same time, lectures of those with no charisma is a real torture, no doubt about that.

A group of people sitting together listening to one person talk are not socializing. Once one person stops monopolizing their collective attention, then they can socialize. The more effective alternatives to lecture bring learners into more engaged contact with each other.

Very narrow concept of socializing. Being in a classroom together is already a signal of group inclusion. Having a collective experience to relate with each other later is part of socialization.

15 years later I can still remember parts of my lectures that were interesting. The only thing I remember about studying is those now banned little energy drink shots.

they banned energy shot drinks?!

Not sure about state side. But it my country they started enforcing the 32mg/100ml caffeine limit. Which was an effective ban.

Lectures are just a jobs program for academics who are stuck on thousands of years old teaching traditions. If a sane world, they'd polish their material, record a video, add graphics, and make it available for students to watch it and rewatch it at their convenience. Pretty much what they do on youtube and in documentaries.

Citation needed, the last time a colleague engaged with the education college and supposed educators they looked at an induction proof with sheer bewilderment as if teaching this at all was impossible

I still remember one course where the lectures were basically just 1:1 summaries of the textbook, so I said "This is a waste of time. See you at the exam", and many of the more traditional showing-up-is-half-the-battle crowd were like "GASP, you can't do that!" because from very little we're taught that attendance is more important than outcome.

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