To positively add to your viewpoint, my experience as first a student and later a professor is that many students prefer slides/notes to blackboard because the

To positively add to your viewpoint, my experience as first a student and later a professor is that many students prefer slides/notes to blackboard because the former often gives them the perception that they learn more. Slides/notes are fixed content. It's also finite content that you have to learn. If you learn all that content, you have mastered the course. So, it's quite easy to assess how much you have learned. But slides/notes don't teach skills well, and teach even more poorly on how to think in the course domain. Books also do poorly at this. The only way to learn skills and ways of thought is, as you say, by imitation. The imitation happens on the blackboard, where a good lecturer thinks out loud, gets the students to think out loud with him, and hopefully transfers the rhyme and rhythm of the discipline to them. The 'problem' is that you can't really nail down concretely from a blackboard lecture what you are supposed to learn. Moreover, no matter how much you read the book, and master the content, you will always feel like you aren't thinking as well as the lecturer was. So you feel bad. Of course, if you let the pain drive you, you continue on your path of learning. If you don't, then blackboard courses feel horrible [1]. [1] A huge percentage, I would hazard, majority of lecturers are not of sufficiently good quality. Teaching is incredibly difficult. So, many blackboard courses, as do many notes/slides courses fail because the lecturer was just bad.