9 ms·

While substantive data is always nice, this has always struck me as a bit of a "duh" factor. Lectures are omnipresent because they're cost effective. Pedagogica

• praseodym 12y ago
  You're completely right about teaching being an afterthought: just look at a university's hiring policy. New staff (researchers) are hired because of their research skills, i.e. the number of publications they can deliver or the number of grants they can receive, certainly not because of their teaching skills. Good teaching skills are only considered a nice benefit.
  • privong 12y ago
    To be fair, this is often less true for colleges, where there's a stronger emphasis on teaching.
    • Fomite 12y ago
      Or any university hiring lecturers.
  • zacinbusiness 12y ago
    My wife, a university professor, was hired only after three extensive teaching demonstrations. I think some universities and departments focus in research while others focus on academics.
• ericHosick 12y ago
  There are very scalable ways to lecture (enable learning) such as student centered learning (called active learning in the post). These are both cost effective and result in better learning outcomes. Lectures are omnipresent for many reasons. One is because it is a lot easier to stand up in front of the class and just spew out knowledge than to take the time to understand what the students need in a class and adjust lectures appropriately.
  • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    At the grad level, you get closer to what the professor is actually researching, and they have a better handle on it. Getting a professor to empathize with a 1st year undergraduate is much harder than getting them to empathize with a 1st year grad student.
• sharkweek 12y ago
  Little freshman sharkweek back in '03, having gone to a small high school (graduating class of ~70 or so) walks into his first class at the University of Washington, Economics 201 (the first of the series). The class is 700 people, in Kane Hall, literally 10x my entire graduating class from HS. After the first lecture, and with extreme naivety, I walk up to the professor, Eugene Silberberg, and ask him when his office hours are in case I need any help with the material. The perplexed look on his face was probably the most memorable thing I experienced my entire four years in college. "Uh, go talk to your TA"
  • dublinben 12y ago
    It's pretty easy to avoid the enormous introductory level lecture classes. Nearly every large university will grant credit for AP or CLEP exams towards undergraduate level classes like Econ 201. These exams cost under $100 for an entire course. You can also find many schools offering these courses online, for a bit more money. Transferring in a credit is painless.
    • valarauca1 12y ago
      > Transferring in a credit is painless. Actually transferring college credits is one of the most painful things I've done in my academic career.
      • deleted 12y ago
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      • Loughla 12y ago
        How long ago did you attend? Almost all states have made public colleges and universities arrange transfer agreements to guarantee credits will transfer. Most private, not-for-profits have taken up this cause as well. For-profits are still a bit wonky with transferring, because their academic rigor tends to be terrible. Now, out of state transfers, that's another story.
• eatitraw 12y ago
  > 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-professor-teaches-coursera.html http://educationoutrage.blogspot.de/2013/01/princeton-profes...
  • Fomite 12y ago
    I vastly prefer lectures to books.
    • sgeisenh 12y ago
      Agreed. Lectures enforce pacing and accountability better than I ever could on my own.
    • watwut 12y ago
      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.
      • aydinghajar 12y ago
        "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.
        • grayclhn 12y ago
          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.
• kleiba 12y ago
  Here's my counter anecdote: I also work at an institution that can be described like yours. To me, listening to a professor lecturing has always been the most effective way of learning something. Not because the lecturing quality was so outstanding but because I apparently can absorb new information better when somebody explains it while I think along. I fall asleep much quicker when I read a text book (as opposed to a lot of other students).
  • bm1362 12y ago
    Throwing myself behind your anecdote. Works for me, I remain engaged with a lecturer. Different strokes.
  • aurumpotest 12y ago
    I too learn effectively when I've got outstanding lecturers lecturing at me. However that's rarely the case - some lecturers don't really care for the students; some care but aren't that great at lecturing... So in practice, lectures don't even always work for students who learn effectively from lectures.
• Spooky23 12y ago
  Alot of that is a filter placed there deliberately. CSI 201 was a class with 2 500+ lecture sections and something like 30 lab sections. The graduating group for Computer Science had about 75 students. 201 weeded out the fratboys and folks who used "sort by first job starting salary" approach to picking a major. The 300 level courses washed out the people who weren't passionate/insane, and the 400 level courses taught you stuff.
  • thecage411 12y ago
    I still remember the shock I had upon taking my first few graduate-level classes. The lectures and assignments were actually focused on the material rather than weeding people out through large, poorly specified projects / problem sets.
• gcd 12y ago
  I'm about to graduate from Berkeley, a so-called 'top' school. Besides the name of the degree, I can't think of anything that was particular top-notch about my education here. Class sizes were big and are only getting bigger. The intro CS class had a few hundred when I took it. Now? It can have up to 1100 students. I would say I've only had 4 good or great professors (enthusiastic, interesting, smart but also good at teaching) my whole time here - one in CS, one in EE, the other two in humanities. Everyone else ranged from useless or unbearable to okay. Many were simply too smart, so to speak. In other classes, the lecture powerpoints did most of the work for them. In fact, most of my learning took place while taking notes independently on lecture notes / slides (rarely the textbook, although sometimes they were okay), sometimes watching lectures from other schools, and then trying to apply the knowledge to projects and practicing for exams. Discussion sections were only occasionally useful, generally for the more difficult classes where I actually needed an empathetic person who recently took the course to explain things to I. For the most part, though, I feel like I taught myself most of what I learned here - I would have done fine if lectures didn't exist. Mind you, this only applies to the CS program. I took only the required EE courses. The great thing about the institution is definitely the research. My graphics professor, for example, does a ton of awesome work both academically and professionally. Working with him would have been a great opportunity to get into that industry. Otherwise, I don't see why I couldn't have just done my education by myself. The only problem would be motivation to slug through the difficult / boring but important stuff. My databases class got quite boring at points such that, if I were teaching myself, I may have just skipped over a good chunk of the class material. I'm imagining that if I just had a person to get on my case and me on them, it would be almost as effective as the concept of a GPA.
  • grayclhn 12y ago
    That's too bad. Two of the best classes I've taken in my life were at Berkeley -- econ 141 (econometrics, about 80 students) and math 195 (undergraduate stochastic differential equations, about 5-10 students, 3 I think taking for a grade. If I'm off on the course number, sorry.) This was over a decade ago, though. Two thoughts, 1: you've been screwed by the California budget over the last 5-10 years. 2: I don't know what the most advanced classes were in your field, but Berkeley (and other top top schools) offers classes that are unimaginable at other universities. An undergraduate SDE class really is "unimaginable" most places, and learning the material from a textbook would be impossible -- it's too difficult and appropriate textbooks don't exist. The "textbook" is usually the instructor's notes from the last time they taught the class. Anyway, I have enormous fondness for Berkeley and the three classes I took there got me into grad school and kicked off my career (I took these classes after graduating from college --- Tufts, which is a great liberal arts-oriented school with generally small classes and personal attention, but it ain't got undergraduate SDE --- and moving to the bay area), so I'm kind of saddened to read your experience. edit: typos