I was bored out of my mind in one of the few MQ18 lectures I have attended this semester. So, I wrote the start of a treatise.

Why do we have lectures? The advantage of listening to someone is that they can customize the lecture to the audience. That person can also pose questions and guide the course based on the responses.

So, if the teacher of a course doesn’t do anything with who is listening, it is exactly the same as reading the material in a book or on a PowerPoint. In fact, it’s worse! Reading is a lot quicker than listening (twice as fast according to the source on Wikipedia). Also, it’s not a big deal to reread something if it doesn’t make sense.

It makes sense to kill the lecture. After writing a good set of slides and finding a good textbook, an instructor doesn’t have to do anything. Indeed, he can focus on improving the course instead of repeating the same thing every year. Or perhaps he could focus on interacting with students on a personal basis?

With the internet, the conventional lecture doesn’t stand a chance. MIT OpenCourseWare, as well as a growing number of forward-thinking educational sites are showing the huge potential of online learning. Why would you settle for your barely audible Calc 2 professor when you can get professor Arthur Mattuck to teach you LaPlace transformations instead?

(I skimmed over a lot of details in this post. Check out change.org for some killer content about educational reform in the United States. The lead blogger there, Clay Burell, is really attentive about responding to comments, too. Also, an incredible discussion of fundamental flaws in our learning system can be found in Daniel Quinn’s My Ishmael)

Any thoughts? I hope you’ll leave them in the comments.