@liamvhogan When people bring out the “lots of politicians own investment properties” I always think that’s not really getting at the issue. They are on high salaries, and so have money to invest and our system is set up that this is the best investment to make. I think the main obstruction is the issue you raise here - a lot of voters who don’t want change, but also a well resourced lobby group (including media making money out of real estate) who will fight hard against change, I think politicians are thinking way more of this than their personal investments.
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‘Developers only want to build luxury housing’ is a myth that absolutely annoys the hell out of me. -
Tism alert@shlee TISM are on at 1pm
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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.@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.