An educational institution that doesn’t have lectures can be a lot of things but it can’t IMO be a university.
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An educational institution that doesn’t have lectures can be a lot of things but it can’t IMO be a university.
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@liamvhogan you can get pretty close by just nailing theses to the front door though
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Elizabeth M, book bothererreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan in my day* we called them "reading units" and they were my faves - read a bunch, write a bunch, get your credit and move on.
*my entire university experience has been online
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@liamvhogan it's interesting, and this is 100% old man shouts at clouds stuff; I enjoyed lectures back in the olden days when I went to uni, and online doing my Masters, but my experience more recently guesting at both ANU and UC was rather different. Many students didn't bother showing up, those that did spent their time not paying attention to either me or the course teacher.
Adelaide Uni is definitely doing this as a money thing, but I also reckon it's symptomatic of disengagement with what we would have called "the university experience”, which isn't what it once was.
Just another example of the corporatisation of university education. Don't get me started on grading, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
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@liamvhogan at Macquarie law school when I went there, no law subjects had lectures, an approach they’d copied from Harvard’s law school. But that’s because law lecturing had been recognised as uniquely terrible
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@trib @liamvhogan Students are simply reacting to being treated as a mass customer base rather than as ...students.
Adelaide is certainly doing this for $$$ reasons, but that doesn't mean lectures are good, or effective, or necessary. You'd create an excellent educational experience running subjects as a series of small in-person tutorials and workshops. But that would cost way more than cramming 500 students into a lecture theatre or an "asynchronous learning module".
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@hugh @liamvhogan :100a: on all counts
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@liamvhogan though this could be extended to argue that law is a profession, not a scholarly discipline, and has no place in a university
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@fsvo I would definitely
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Liam :fnord:replied to Stephen Collins last edited by
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wolfpantherreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by [email protected]
@liamvhogan Some of the concern over this seems to come from equating lectures with classes. There are other types of classes. A lecture traditionally means that someone delivers the course content to the class and they write notes on it. It is hard to justify to students coming in to uni today that this is how they have to get the material, and in the past they have already voted with their feet. Furthermore, many have little choice - they have to do outside work to get by, so taking things that don’t really need to be done in person and putting them online, whilst making the face to face activities more valuable is a way of recognising this reality.
I have delivered courses without lectures many times. This does not mean the students do not have classes. I took over an abstract algebra course about a decade ago where I basically wrote out the course material on a board and students copied it down. Over that time I modernised it so that students have access to both printed notes and videos online where they first encounter the material, with the flexibility of when to do that, and then I make the most of class time to have a more interactive approach, with students presenting material, working on problems together, or with a class discussion about concepts which is more in depth because they have already had that first encounter with the ideas through the online materials.
The result is that I, as educator, have more interaction with students than when lecturing, and the feedback from students is very positive.
A 50 minute lecture was a compromise when you could not deliver material in other ways, certainly for mathematics it is not a natural way to learn. Ideally you should encounter an idea, then stop and do some working on it yourself - when learning new maths I would never sit and read the equivalent amount of material of a 50 minute lecture with picking up a pen and working out some things for myself. We can structure online materials to allow students to first encounter ideas in a more natural way with a blend of text, video, quizzes, interactive apps - and then follow up with more in depth explorations in the class time.