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Comment by eatitraw | Hacker News Reader

> they're cost effective

Probably not as much as simply reading books.

My currrent understanding that they were cost effective at some point of history, when students didn't have books, but lecturers did:

> Not only are they still lecturing, a relic of the Middle Ages when students didn’t have books and monks read them to them

http://educationoutrage.blogspot.de/2013/01/princeton-profes...

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I vastly prefer lectures to books.

Agreed. Lectures enforce pacing and accountability better than I ever could on my own.

I prefer book to lectures, but whenever I skipped lecture the learning for exam was much more difficult. I do not really know why. I rarely understood things directly during the lecture, I usually just wrote notes. However, just being there and listening made learning afterwards easier.

I usually also got better grade, maybe because I had clearer idea about what lecturer focused on.

Video lectures on coursera were much more effective for me then live lectures. The difference was in speed up, slow down, rewind and stop buttons of course.

"maybe because I had clearer idea about what lecturer focused on."

Exactly. The book covers a much wider range of topics. The lecture just clues you in on what the teacher is going to include on the exam.

That's almost always what the teacher considers the most important material. So, yeah, attending lectures lets you know what concepts are especially important in the subject.

I tend to agree with this one. Half of the point of having a teacher (as opposed to just hit library as some suggest) is to have somebody knowledgeable to tell you what is important/worth your time and what is not.

The textbook author already put in quite a lot of time to prune a subject down to what is most worth your time.

That's not usually the way textbooks work --- they often try to support many instructors who each want to cover more or less the same core plus some nonoverlapping material that the instructor wants to teach. When you add up all of the nonoverlapping material, it becomes less clear what's "most worth your time." Some textbooks present the material as "here's the core" and "here's some other stuff" but I've mostly seen that for advanced texts -- books for high-level undergrad & grad classes.

Compare something like Schaum's Outlines to an undergraduate text for the same material for an example of what I mean. The outlines are pretty pruned down.

edit: just to add one more thought: we read all the time about "opinionated software." Pruning down the material requires understanding and "opinion" in the same way --- textbook authors almost invariably have the understanding, but are usually economically discouraged from imposing their opinion on the material because it can discourage book sales because instructors with different opinions tend to choose a different book. Lecturers don't have the same concerns, so they can prune more aggressively. Authors of textbooks that will never sell well (e.g. the advanced texts I mentioned earlier) don't have the same concerns either since they're never going to make a substantial amount of money off the book, so they can prune pretty heavily too.

Most of them do not. My impression is that they try to cover much more then usual semester long course.

Plus, while it may make sense for textbook to contain five different explanations, theories or proofs or whatever on X, it makes even more sense for professor to require only the most important of them.

> Probably not as much as simply reading books.

For who? Got to keep some sort of pretence up to make people think they're not just purchasing the right to sit the exams.

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