alt Hacker NewsLectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and students dislike it. Faculty like to talk and pretend they're teaching, and students like to listen and pretend they're learning.
All to say—I wish it was this easy to change the academy. But it's not.
Replies
> Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever.
Mainly due to shortage of very good lecturers, no? I can not see a better way to cultivate the professional pride than to attend lectures of truly remarkable professors. The style, the manner, the attitude go much beyond the dry proofs. I'm an applied math major.
15 years later I can still remember parts of my lectures that were interesting. The only thing I remember about studying is those now banned little energy drink shots.
I still remember one course where the lectures were basically just 1:1 summaries of the textbook, so I said "This is a waste of time. See you at the exam", and many of the more traditional showing-up-is-half-the-battle crowd were like "GASP, you can't do that!" because from very little we're taught that attendance is more important than outcome.
Citation needed, the last time a colleague engaged with the education college and supposed educators they looked at an induction proof with sheer bewilderment as if teaching this at all was impossible
Good lectures are phenomenally useful, far better than individual unguided review of the material. They're often IME very interactive too.
STEM subjects are particularly hard to create good lectures for. And STEM expertise and speaking/communication skills don't always overlap either.
The non-STEM classes I learned the most in are the ones I learned the most in lecture in. The STEM classes, on the other hand, were pretty scattershot without as much correlation.
An LLM-based toolset could likely be much better than that and at least as good as bad lectures, but the guardrails are gonna need to be really really really good.