Hacker News Reader

Comment by kazagistar | Hacker News Reader

I was totally with this presentation until the very end. "Don't put your slides/notes online, or people won't have to attend class, and that would be BAD."

No, it would not. Making useless work where none is needed is wrong, so there is no reason to artificially constrain students to being present. If a student is able to learn perfectly from a textbook and notes and other resources, or better yet, a video recording of the lecture, and is able to pass the tests and do the homework to prove they are indeed learning successfully, then there is no problem.

If you have to force students to attend lectures for the sole purpose of justifying the existence of your job, then your job should not exist.

View on HN

I got a bit less far than that.

I feel like this lecturer is recognising that lecturers appear to add more value if they deliberately hinder students from accessing resources outside of their lectures. That's not a good thing.

All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.

If the students are reading ahead, they are better able to interact with the material ahead. That's a good thing.

The goal of the teacher is to help the students learn the subject matter: it's not right to think that they can only do that by paying close attention to your every entertaining word at the time you elect to say it.

I interpreted it as related to the Dunning-Kruger effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect): students think that they understand things when reading the slides, but sometimes they don't realize it. Therefore, making it obvious that they cannot understand the slide can sometimes help. At least in some institutions, a teacher's duty also includes protecting the students from themselves and their own ignorance, by forcing them sometimes to go to classes. They want to minimize failure rates. Also, it should be noted that good students can often learn by themselves (using other materials), but it's the bad students which require more effort.

> All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.

When I held the course for Infosec 101, I made sure that everyone on the course knew two things on the first day:

1) slideware was NOT the study material, they were complementing the lectures and acted only as memory aids

2) the exam was deliberately designed and scored so that it could not be passed by merely trying to learn from the slideware

That gave the students two options. Either attend the lectures and read up on some of the external course material, or try to read all of the listed material and figure out what I'm going to emphasise in the exam. Most of them decided to attend. It probably helped that I was happily cultivating the legend of me being completely loose cannon and able to pull off pretty much any kind of stunt if it helped to make the material more memorable.

It worked too.

>...or try to read all of the listed material and figure out what I'm going to emphasise in the exam.

Or you could have just sent out an email stating what would be emphasized on the exam.

My suggestion is the same: obfuscating what's in the exam does not benefit the students but makes yourself seem more important to their success.

That was never my intention.

My goal was to actively discourage all kinds of rote learning, and require real understanding instead.

I found the suggestion that slides shouldn't make sense actually a very useful one. Slides shouldn't be confused with lecturer scripts, or a written guide to the subject. Those things have their place. However, a slide is a visual tool whose sole task is to increase the comprehension or impact of a talk or lecture.

Confusing the two roles is the main problem with PowerPoints today.

I doubt the author would have any issue with a video of his lectures being online, along with the accompanying slideshow. His issues is with trying to cram all content into the slideshow and simultaneously present said content to a live audience.

The slideshow should act as a visual aid to great teaching, rather than trying to replace it. I liked the idea that the slideshow alone should be nonsensical.

Slides should compliment the instruction, not replace it (and honestly, if one feels they DO replace it then they are probably not doing a very good job presenting it in the first place).

If the slides do not convey the material that is being taught, then the slides are useless. Students generally do refer to slides after lectures, and usually end up staring at a load of incomprehensible nonsense.

The instructor-expert can add flavour and understanding to the slides, and expound upon the points being made, but the slides should also stand alone as a resource.

A lecturer should appreciate that it's impossible to absorb a complex topic during a lecture, and provide resources that later complement what they are saying.

I disagree that the slides have to be able to stand alone. Critical material shouldn't be completely ephemeral, but there's no reason that everything has to be on the slides. It can be in lecture notes, textbooks, and so on.

>If the slides do not convey the material that is being taught, then the slides are useless.

No. that's the point. Slides have one purpose only - to help the student during the talk. Attempting to make them dual-purpose, namely....

>Students generally do refer to slides after lectures,

Is to end up with the worst of both worlds. If the lecturer wants to distribute notes or a transcript after the lecture, that'a what they should do.

> but the slides should also stand alone as a resource.

Nope

A lecturer should appreciate that it's impossible to absorb a complex topic during a lecture, and provide resources that later complement what they are saying.

> yes - just not in the for, of slides.

I agree with you on this point, but asking a lecturer to provide slides and notes creates a lot of work for them.

It's a difficult task to make one set to an adequate standard, so I was assuming you would use one set for both jobs (as seems to be the case in higher ed courses I'm familiar with).

The best courses I took were ones where the lecturer published lecture notes. That shows the professor actualy created lecture notes!

Andrew Ng's Machine Learning lecture notes are world famous.

My slideshows from my 'talks', are always, as a matter of principle, incomprehensible without me presenting them. I have no problem with the actual presentation being recorded and provided for later (video/audio + slides), so that people who wish to learn/enjoy at their own pace can do so. I have never come across a slide-deck that in and of itself is a replacement for the speaker, I have only ever seen 'failed attempts' at making such monstrosities by people who have no concept of the limitations inherent to power(less)point.

TL;DR: If you are making a slide-deck for an in-person presentation and also expect it to be a stand-in for you in your absence, then you are doing it wrong!

Instructors try to help students to make good decisions. If you'll grant that coming to class _and_ studying alone is the best possible student strategy, then class policies that encourage that are good.

If you doubt that students need help to avoid poor choices, consider how common cheating is, and how much effort we put into making it less rewarding for them.

It's a fact that if you put all the class notes online, some students will not come to class, thus you did not do them a favour.

And you had me until "better yet, a video recording of the lecture".

Is there a place between text notes for people who learn from text and live lectures for people who need interaction that is best filled with a video? Are there actually people in that place?

Neither does it provide the interaction of a live event nor the depth and individual pacing of the written word.

Most of the time most students attending live lectures are there to just listen. At least that was my experience when I was still studying. I found video recordings to be just as good as, or even better than, attending lectures. With recordings you can study things at your own pace, while doing exercises/experiments. You can also review the lectures later when preparing for an exam, or when you just want a refresher on some topic. And they obviously help when you have overlapping classes. You can always email/talk to the teacher if you have a question about something.

I know this is logistically ridiculous, but one time I had a teacher that was retiring, and for his last quarter of algorithms class he hired someone to record all of the lectures.

BEST CLASS EVER. I went to almost all of the lectures, but when I got home the video was usually already online - so if I missed something during the lecture, no worries, I could go back and rewatch it. IT WAS AWESOME.

Slides are terrible though - the problem is that it takes forever to make really good slides. I've seen it done before, and when it's done right it's a real piece of art, but 99% of the time slides are copied/made in haste and then the teacher just reads them off in class too quickly.

The only plus side to slides is you don't have to read the teacher's awful writing that is usually too small on a board that's too small for the giant room.

It's less logistically ridiculous if you can get institutional support, or get funding to make it happen.

I guess I was lucky in that respect. My university taught cs in two different cities (out of the three where they had a campus), and many advanced/optional classes only had a teacher in one of the cities (with an assistant in the other). Our classrooms were equipped with video conference gear, and since lectures were already going to be through the video system for half of the class, putting recordings online was sort of an automatic bonus.

It does give individual pacing, just with a lot of pausing/skipping back. And more detail than the notes, otherwise the notes would suffice.

I spent my entire university career skipping out on lectures because I would never get much out of them. The spoken word is too slow when paced to the dumbest student, the linear straightjacket of slides goes against my natural inclination to imagine and experiment on tangents, and most professors insisted on telling rather than showing anyway, which is horribly inefficient.

If I'd had videos, I could have watched them at 2x, paused when I needed to to go do some sketching or googling, and learned more in the same amount of time because I was directing my own learning and not limited to somebody else's linear encoding of ideas into words.

Your problem seems to be with specific styles of teaching rather than offline videos vs. live teaching.

I could come up with a plausible scenario where everytime I try to learn from videos, pause and google something - I constantly receive mis-information and half-truths which confuse me further and cause me to google more random things. In this case I need to attend lectures so that I can interact with an established expert on the topic and ask questions 'live'.

He tells you that the slides SHOULDN'T stand on their own, because an integral part of a class is, well, the teacher actually teaching. The issue with posting the files online is that some students get the mistaken impression that they do cover all the necessary information in class (they do for many other classes, at least), so it is better to not make the files available than get students _thinking_ they were finding all your material.

The audience for slides-alone vs slide-accompanying is vastly different. I often see them confused when a presenter has a 12 point font on slide meant for 100 people, or when I download a slide deck and there is a single word slide. Doesn't jive.

We need both formats.

The medium is the message, if the medium is slides plus presenter, the lecture needs to be recorded.

We are at this amazing point in history where the avenues for communication currently outstrip our ability to use them. We should all be finding ways to fill that gap.

I think the bigger point was that your power point should not be a sufficient resource because it means its definitely bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com