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Podcasts of University Lectures?
theslashdot asks: "I'm working at a major university in the US, and have been charged with posting pod-casts of class lectures on the internet. The problem is whether or not posting the videos would allow students to skip class and just download the lecture, instead. I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam. So what methods can be used to provide these pod-casts for the students who actually attended class? In terms of when the lecture should be posted, what would be a good time-frame? Immediately after the class? 24 hours? One week? One class behind schedule?"
"In terms of trying to prevent this, here are some possible solutions I've come up with:
- Post the lecture with authentication based on the class list for those enrolled in the course, although this would not really discourage truancy.
- Post the lecture with authentication based on those who attended the class (student cards would have to be barcode-scanned at the beginning of class); this would prevent those who missed the class from downloading the lecture, but presumably they could receive a copy from a student who did attend the class. Additionally it would create a major hassle for all students to ensure that their attendance is registered.
- Post the lecture with a single password that the professor distributes to the class during the lecture. This would discourage students from missing the lecture, but likely those students missing class could simply obtain the password from another student who did attend the class."
- Post the lecture with authentication based on the class list for those enrolled in the course, although this would not really discourage truancy.
- Post the lecture with authentication based on those who attended the class (student cards would have to be barcode-scanned at the beginning of class); this would prevent those who missed the class from downloading the lecture, but presumably they could receive a copy from a student who did attend the class. Additionally it would create a major hassle for all students to ensure that their attendance is registered.
- Post the lecture with a single password that the professor distributes to the class during the lecture. This would discourage students from missing the lecture, but likely those students missing class could simply obtain the password from another student who did attend the class."
If they can get the information from other places, why are you concerned if they come to class or not? As long as they are learning, your job is done.
None let non-students view? That doesn't seem very useful for the rest of us.
People who are going to skip class will either way, and they'll eventually get a copy regardless of your counter measures. Why make the "good" students jump through hoops or make the job overly difficult for yourself?
I don't really see why you're worried about discouraging truancy. Most students will probably desire to attend the class anyway, if nothing else for the social aspect. MIT posts videos of all their lectures (or is trying to get to that point, I'm not sure how far they are) and I don't see them having any problems.
Another thing, I suspect this would be beneficial to some students who, like me, are not morning people. If I have to drag my ass out the door for an 8:00 class there's a good chance I'm not going to be paying much attention to the lecture. If a student chooses to defer his viewing of the lecture to a time when he's actually awake I don't see why he shouldn't be allowed to do so.
As long as he is learning, I see no reason why you should try and hide lectures from kids who choose to learn in a different way. (audio as opposed to sitting through class) Listening to all of them the day before an exam is no different from cramming the night before.
Making anything available outside of class time enables students to skip classes. Some students will skip more classes because they know they can get the notes later, other will never miss class, still others will miss class no matter what.
If you really want to help out good students put up these podcasts. Don't make it harder to get at because of a few bad apples, don't penalize good students because of the bad ones.
And then, there's the bottom line for all universities. Are they still paying for the class? Then get off their fuckin' backs about showing up all the time.
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
The "Good" student will still turn up as they wish to interact with the lecturer, ask questions etc. They will download the podcast as a memory tool and use it to just "check" on anything they missed...
The "Bad" students still WONT turn up to lectures, they never did in the first place, and they will download these pod casts, and not learn anything.
The "other" students wont turn up to lectures, they never have, but they have never needed to, they already know the infomation and are going though the paces to get a peice of paper to prove it, they may download the pod cast, but it doensn't really matter when they listen to it, as its just going to tell them what they already know.
Btw im in the "other" section, after lectures being late, not speaking english, not turning up at all, not knowing wtf they are doing, i've ceased going to lectures except for two or three subjects where i get on well with the lecturer. This i dont waste hours of my day walking into university (college for you us kids) only to find the lecture is cancled/dead/blown up.
I revise from books and the internet, and so far i've had some of the best rates i've ever had (~65% instead of the 40%~ i used to get in schools.)
So.... this will change nothing. Enjoy
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
If the lecture materials are available online as well as a video of the lecture, how are students who don't go in to Uni "bad"? As long as they watch it, if they can get the same level of comprehension off it then who cares!
A couple of the lecturers at my Uni are only offering their classes via video download and not physically teaching classes.
"damnit, trolley I want in your signature." - Elburrito
As a graduate student who teaches a C programming course, I feel the onus on having students attend lies solely on the teacher. There are many ways including quizzes and graded in-class assignments that easily take the place of traditional attendance. My personal preference is to do things like that, with the lowest score dropped, just in case someone has to miss for whatever reason.
;)
And despite this seeming to be a replacement for in class instruction, students who don't attend class miss out on the ability to question material as it's presented.
You're basically asking for a simple, effective DRM scheme. If you come up with one, you'll be rich (but hated on Slashdot
Jon
you're getting paid to teach, not to babysit
Provide them the information you think is necessary in whatever form, and allow them to determine how they will use it.
If there is something to be gained by being in the class, then I'll be there. If I can get just as much out of it by not going (and face it.. bachelor's degrees at least in the US are becoming so common as to be meaningless, and the standards are lowered to accomodate this as well in most cases), then why should I have to go? Lectures are about giving out information. It's usually a one way mechanism, occasionally (and rarely) does someone ask a question during the lecture. If you want class participation, make a discussion course. Oh, but discussing integrals doesn't really make sense, does it?
I treated college as a rubber stamp that I needed to get a job. Did I learn things? Yes. Did I do it by sitting in class? No, I did it by doing the assignments, or just learning what I needed to right before the test. I pick things up quickly and one reading of the textbook of a subject I'm interested in is good enough for me to remember where to go when I need the information again (or to classify the information so I can find it later). College isn't (and shouldn't be!) about rote memorization of stupid facts. If you're teaching me to think, then do it by challenging me (not making me sit in a lecture while you talk at me and I'm eyeing the girl two rows away). If you're trying to force me to learn something, give up hope right now -- you can't force someone to learn something when they don't want to.
I welcome all the responses telling me that I'm an idiot or whatever, that's fine. I'm a bit full of myself with regards to how quickly I pick things up (and no, I don't remember everything -- but I will remember that there was something that I don't know the details of 100%, and will then know to look for it again to re-learn it when I need to use it). Why force me to be on the same level of the people who are also there for the rubber stamp, but are on the bottom end of the pool of applicants? I went to a school and in to a major that had a rather noticeable lack of various groups (blacks, women), and it was somewhat apparent that there were a few people in the school who got there to equalize the numbers and not because of ability. Why force me on their level? The person I'm thinking of actually asked a college level, calculus-based physics-for-engineers professor to explain how 3x = 2x + 10 became 5x = 10, x=2 (the numbers might have been different, but it was similarly simplistic).
I was a TA in one-on-one labs, gave several lectures and presentations, etc. I continue to do so to this day, at my current job. Guess what? I don't care if the students remember what I say, that's up to them to want to do. If the people who DO care remember that the information is out there and it's accessible later, then I've done my job. If all they have is a powerpoint presentation with a couple brief sentences at the end when they want to go back to the information, then I consider my job a failure, but that's another discussion.
Basically -- You're going to do this, some of the students will find a way around it (the smart ones), the other students will use said way around it (the lazy ones, not necessarily different from the smart ones), and you'll just piss people off. Don't.
A good way for encouraging people to come to class is to make attendence required, and record attendence at every lecture. Make it part of the grade. Then, just release the podcast when it's ready. This way the podcast is a resource, and not really connected to people's motivation to attend class or not.
Just FYI:
My university runs a lecture podcasting program: http://podcast.its.msstate.edu/
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Seriously, if the students can blow off lecture, or it's not necessary, why is that a problem?
Take the case of a university student who does as you say, and skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and still does well in the class. The university still gets paid. The professor still gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing greater attention to the students who do choose to be there. The skipping student does well, and gets a good grade, and the professor has a more attentive and interested audience. Everyone wins.
Now, take the case of the student who skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and bombs the course. The university gets paid. The professor gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing for greater attention for the students who are there. The skipping student does poorly, and either learns to go to lecture in the future, or gets booted out of school. Everyone wins except for the student, who only screwed himself.
Just put up the podcasts.
Have quizzes in class every day, that count as much all totaled for points, if not more, of the overall grade in the class than the final. Typically, a final can't be worth more than 50% of a grade. That might vary by institution, but the reason being so it can't HURT someone's (a good student's) grade as much as it could help another's (a not so good student's). The instructor would also be an idiot for not figuring out a way to make the system work, along with the students for their grade. It's not that hard to figure out once you do it the first time. Remember, negative feedback is the best teacher!
Do what the professor asks you to do.
It's not your job to make the class interesting or hard enough to attend. Be flexible and just post the podcasts when you get them, or when the professors ask you to.
Why are you a "bad Student" is you "staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam"
I watched about 40% of all my lectures at Stanford on a TV screen, time shifted from the lecture. At Stanford this practice is encouraged.
It works better for me personally, the crowd in the classroom is often distracting, and I waste time carting my body all over campus.
You can hear better, pause to take notes or read up on a topic in the book in the middle of the lecture when you get lost -- there are losts of positive benefits from video-based classes. Most I played back at 1.5x speed, so the voice gota bit whiny, but it was over in 40 minutes instead of an hour. What I LOVED was for topics I already know about, I could skip them.
In my opinoion, the premise in education that people have to be forced to attend is completely detrimental to the learning environment - it harms those there who want to learn. Manditory attendance is required when there has been a removal of accountability for those who choose not to learn.
How exactly is this a problem? I can speak from experience (and anecdotal evidence == cold hard data 'round these parts) that posting lectures online is certainly not going to prevent students from going to class. Furthermore, you're going to have students that don't want to go to class regardless of having the lectures online (I'm sure you're well aware of this, especially if you've had to teach an 8am class). What I think you should realize is that students not coming to class is NOT a personal knock on you, your teaching abilities, the size of your penis, or anything else.
Another thing that you should realize is that while some students [sarcasm]obviously[/sarcasm] have much better things to do than going to class, that doesn't mean they don't want to learn. One of my favorite classes last year was a psych class where the professor posted her powerpoint lecture notes before class. They were great to print out and bring to class (when I went) and great to print out and study from when 9am Monday morning just wasn't an option. Honestly, do you think you're benefitting the students that don't go to class by trying to withhold the lecture notes? If you're that hell-bent on having students attend, give extra points for attendance or class participation. Or *gasp* grade the students on what pertinent subject matter they actually learned. Let tests and quizzes speak for themselves. If studends can learn on their own with just the lecture notes, let them be. Some students left to their own devices can thumb through a book and listen to a class lecture at the gym and learn just as much as by attending classes. If they have questions on the material, they're perfectly capable of attending class or finding you during office hours.
As a student, I say don't be a hardass and let students learn how they feel they should. If they don't attend and fail, it's no skin off your back. If they don't attend and pass with flying colors, let them be. Don't try to DRM your class lectures just to encourage attendance. More than anything, I think you'll just alienate the ones that don't like coming to class anyway. Don't try to get cute and just post the flippin' podcasts.
I only mod funny =D
Make the podcasts available, or not. Charge a premium for them, or not. But the whole point of the pod is that of time-shifting: The student CANNOT attend the lecture when it is scheduled, so he downloads the podcast and "attends" when he can. Better living through science, and all that.
The professor is being charged with educating the student; if he, being assisted by a download and that omnipresent little white box, can succeed in accomplishing that education without a student even entering his classroom, more power to him, sez me. Of course, we all know the issue is one of ego. The prof wants to be hi-tech hip with his words downloadable daily, yet he still wants to see a full lecture hall hanging upon every word of wisdom as if they were dollops of moist angel food.
Now, to answer your actual question. Set up a matrix of authentication codes, columns of lecture dates by rows of students. The prof hands them out at the end of each lecture, all good for a single podcast download of the lecture they just heard (WTF? But hey, that's the academic ego, I suppose...) The code is your daily password, your SS# is your UID. Of course, if you want to give both your code AND and your SS# to your truant bud, nothing stops you except the ickiness, and the fact that the code is good for only one download of that lecture.
And this was back in the mid-90s, so I had nothing except class notes from classmates and textbooks to follow. There were some classes I attended only the first class and the last class to for the entire semester. Granted, I didn't get A's, but I usually got solid B's. 10 years later, I'm Lead Programmer where I work (I learned how to program after I graduated), making about $135k/year in Silcon Valley, so I'm doing okay.
Don't try to figure out a way to get the kids from skipping... nothing you do will them from being stupid and skipping class (yes I was stupid for skipping class, because I was paying $2000/semester for nothing). Actually, it probably helped me learn how to teach myself from reading from textbooks.
So what methods can be used to provide these pod-casts for the students who actually attended class?
An attendance policy? Miss class 6 times, you fail. That's the policy at my university, and it works.
[ check out my ruby book @ http://ww
If Professors make attendence part of the final grade, say 30% or more, then students will need to attend most of the classes to keep that grade from slipping.
My biggest beef is "dumb" questions being asked during lecture, but that's mostly due to the fact that I understand the material very quickly. Half the time I fall asleep or begin working on some other thing (program assignment for that class due next week or work for another class). Having lectures really does help so that I can go back and see if I missed something during the time I was half-listening.
Now most of my professors are using presentations done with power point and making them available. Much better than a podcast considering they're chinese(haven't even bothered to ask what they're first language actually is). Of course, your situation will vary.
I have nothing to say.
Video podcasts are better than audio-only, which is what Penn State is currently doing - but transcripts would be better than either of these. Audio/video lecture seems useful ONLY to students who did not attend the class. For those who attended, it'd be far more useful to have a scannable transcript where the major and difficult points could be focused on. Podcasts are just like taking your own tape recorder to class. Marginally useful, but usually just a waste of time.
My VB teacher posts his ASAP, usually withing 24 hours. The school-wide rule is if you miss two weeks of class in a row or like 25% or something like that overall, you're booted from the class. That filters out all the lazy slackers that don't deserve degrees or jobs because they can't even take the effort to show up.
Also, use a lot of hand gestures and non-verbals so people will get the just of the lecture for review purposes but would still do poorly if they missed the original lecture.
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
So you've been given the task of making lectures available to students. As if you're their dictator, you're worried about some of them watching them because they couldn't make it to class for some reason, despite them having paid for the class. What's the scoop? Why are you so worried about _them_? They're paying for it, right? There will be less people in the classroom if your dreaded scenario took place, and that's normally good, right? It's their responsibility to pass, right? So why do care whether they're there or not? Is it some gross way of telling yourself you have power?
The fact is, the lecture should be available at anytime, whether they were present for it or not. When I go to class, I often find myself distracted (By something that went on earlier, the car that almost hit me on the way there, the blonde to my left that's not wearing a bra, the sound of the failing ballast in the flourescent light, etc) and often not able to take very accurate notes. Most of the notes are good, but I often wish I could recall what the teacher said about X, or Y, or what she said in between A and B. A digital format would always be more beneficial than harmful, IMHO, especially if I have a bested interest in the subject.
Is it about educating students or is it about putting asses in seats?
If it's the first, just post the things. Especially useful to students with learning (and other) disabilities.
If it's the latter, why post them? Because someone heard that podcasts were popular with kids these days?
I work at a large private university in Washington, DC, and we currently post some class lectures online, although only at the professor's request. There were, of course, concerns about students skipping, but so far, after a year, it really hasn't been an issue. Most of the classes have attendance policies, and the students still have to obey those. The students seem to appreciate having access to the older class lectures around finals, and in a format they can use while doing other things.
Personally, I think if the students want to pay to not to attend class, then that's their right. If it hurts their education, they're only hurting themselves.
They did already pay for the class, so i mean, if they choose to skip it, it is definitely their choice. If you want to make the lectures available later i don't see the problem either way.
Would you prefer they show up and do a crossword or fall asleep?
They are adults. You are not their mother.
What is your exact intent? Students are going to still miss / skip class (podcast or no podcast). Remember every student learns differently
Though I'm not entirely proud of this, I slept literally through an entire semester of classes (of 20 semester credit hours), both because
I had to commute 2 1/2 hours and because 2 of the professors were that boring in person. That being said I had a tape recorder which allowed
me to record all of my classes (with permission of my professors). I listened to the tapes on the bus and train while I studied going to and from
college, and ended the semester with 3 A's and 2 B+'s.
Now I'm not a genius, but I believe everybody learns differently. An unrestricted podcast may help some of your students actually get better grades.
Granted, like other posters have said you'll have good and bad students in your classes. Students who want to learn will and others will not.
You may want to look at UC Berkeley's approach on iTunes. I attend a different university, but I
suppleiment some of my classes with their free podcasts. Just something to consider.
Regards,
MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)
Regards,
MBC1977,
I think that what you should ask yourself is, what is the objective of your class and how does your teaching style work with that objective.
It's my understanding that your objective in teaching the class is give your students the information about the class. Of course if it were that easy, we wouldn't need professors at all, and we could rely on books.
A class professor will go beyond the text. He (or she) assumes that the students have already read the material and can then summarize the lessons as well as provide guidance and insight into the lessons. When I was in school (about ten years ago), it wasn't uncommon for professors to offer class notes in the form of printouts of slides that were presented in class. I found this to be very helpful, allowing me to focus on the lecture itself more than structuring my notes. I'd still take notes, but they would be in conjunction with the class slides.
Having a podcast of the class would take the conveince to another step and make it possible for students to have access to the lecture itself after class. I know that some students have recorded lectures to review later. Having a podcast of a class seems like a great way to offer this without the student needing to do the work of recording, just as the slides made it more convenient to take notes in class. Some professors felt that note-taking was an important skill, and that offering the slides would make it "too easy", but I fail to see what this has to do with the objective of teaching the class the material.
As for the issue of class attendance- is class attendance a requirement for the course? If so, it should be made clear in the course material. If you take attendance and students fail to show up, then the podcasts don't matter.
Other have pointed out that MIT and other schools are presenting all class material online. This serves lots of purposes, but I think that we can all agree that there is more to a class than just the books and study material, even if it includes the recorded lectures.
Just use a tried and true method... take attendance. If the class is too big for that you can pass around an attendance sheet and trust your students not to sign for each other... although that might not help your situation much. Or you can just hand out small quizzes at the beginning of each class (or once a week or something) and use those to figure out who was attending or not. You can even make the quiz questions simple ones to determine if the students did the reading for last night's homework, as an additional bonus!
My university (Bond Uni in Australia) had a similar program for lectures when I was there, although it was only for the law school. Every law lecture was recorded on VCR, and the tapes placed in the library to be loaned out using the standard process. I believe it took about a week, although this was probably because of the physical meatspace component, not because of any policy.
Law students would use these tapes to catch up on missed lectures, but they would also use them as study aids around exam time. Groups of students would borrow (or copy) the tapes and sit down in someone's lounge to watch an entire semester's worth of Constitutional Law or Torts in a day. Not much fun, but it probably helped for the upcoming exam. Sometimes they'd even pause the lecture and chat about a salient point for a bit, or even curse themselves for enrolling to study law.
Canned lectures are usually never as good as being there, so I think restrictions on viewing are unnecessary. The mp3s will get handed around anyway, so don't waste your time.
I can think of several ways to do this, but none of them are easy. You are absolutely correct in the last option about if you give a password for each lecture that it will eventually slip from friends. In reality, it won't just "slip", it will probably be on a P2P network or at the very least on someone's read only network share on the university network.
What you should be asking yourself is, will this benefit the majority of students in the class? Will it be a good resource for those who want to use to apply themselves to further their knowledge of the subject(s)? I think the answer to all those questions is "yes."
Will a few people take advantage of this? Probably. But these are the same people who would be already debating the question of, "Should I show up for class today?", and will make answer that depending on how they feal that day anyway.
There is an easier solution, make attendance part of your grade... Have attendance sheets at the entrances/exits of the room. Keep them out for about 10 minutes into the class and then collect them. It doesn't need to be a big part of the grade, maybe 5%. Or maybe it is only used as a consideration for those people who are on the cusp (maybe they failed by 1 point, but came to you for help during the term and also came to all of your lectures, and they tried their best, but just couldn't grasp something... Now it really depends on what the class is and what the student's major is, but you will at least have some idea that they did everything they could do to pass the course. Basically if you had a mechanical engineer who is taking micro economics, and just doesn't understand some of the rules, maybe you pass the person... If that same mechanical engineer is taking a course on materials physics, well, I think you still fail the student, since it is a core component of what their need to know in order to finish their major...)
Back on topic a bit, personally I say release the pod casts. What this will do is help all your students to actually look at the big picture of the lectures and have a chance to actually "listen" to what is being said instead of focusing on trying to write/type it all down. It will give you a chance to actually teach and interact with your students instead of just dictating...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
so let them make up their own mind whether to attend lecture or watch the video later. It's up to the exam to determine whether they learned the material or not, let them make their choices about how they learn the material and be responsible for those choices.
They're not kids anymore.
Using your school's VLE/LMS solution link content availability to a gradebook item which is linked to attendence. Of course this means the prof has to actually take attendence, but if its really that important that they physcially go to class, then you should take attendance.
It seems most people here are of the opinion that attendance is not necessary if the student can obtain the knowledge without it. While I am in general agreement with this idea, there is one very VERY important aspect of attendance at universities:
Alumni that will actually show up to work and show up on time.
I have employed dozens of college kids and worked with more that have graduated and I can tell you there is a definite correlation between college kids that attended class vs those who didn't and graduates who show up to work on time and those who don't.
A university degree doesn't just mean you went through the hoops to get a piece of paper. It has the name of the university on that paper. It means THAT particular university says you're capable of doing the job employers need done. When employers fill out surveys about their employees and give lower ratings to the students of University X than University Y, it hurts University X and all of the students who do or intend to attend there. The school has a reputation to uphold. It's reputation for producing quality graduates has a direct bearing on what kinds of high school graduates will even apply for that school. So yes, attendance is important.
I will caveat this by saying that I believe it should be limited to 100 and 200 level courses. By the time a student is in the 300 and 400 level courses, attendance policies should be laxed. However, that is up to the university.
So, on to the subject of how to do this in the best way possible . . .
There are some other points missing too. What about students who were out sick? Students out on bereavement? Students out because they were otherwise reasonably detained? Those are going to cause a lot of problems for you and the students. One thing to keep in mind is that this is a BONUS. Universities have been around for thousands of years without this ability. Getting access to this should be considered a privilege, not a right. So make sure your students understand that this could become unavailable at a moment's notice or you might face students complaining to the Dean of Students that you said these pod-casts would be available and the fact they are not the night before an exam caused them to be unable to study effectively. Just nip that in the bud before it blooms.
However you take attendance, tell students that a minimum of a certain percentage attendance record is required to view the podcasts. If their attendance drops below that, remove them from the permissions file. Or, maybe make the policy if you miss X or more days of class in a given semester, you will not have access to the site.
This is about the best you can do. The only way to do much better than this is to go to such an extreme that you make more work for your podcast control than you do in teaching the class which is unacceptable.
I agree with a previous post in this thread in that you are looking for a working DRM which doesn't exist. As with all security, the old adage holds true: Locks are for the honest. Don't put too much effort into this until a reasonably valid DRM is available for your use.
Or, try to hook the university into implementing a university wide podcast system and put the security requirements on their end. Then you can bitch to them when they screw it up. That's how things work at my university. Always shift the workload AND the blame (since you know it will be there) to others. Just make sure you're not the one without a chair when the music stops.
One of the key aspects afforded to "good" students who attend a class in person is that one is afforded the opportunity to halt the instructor with a question in the event that they start taking off too fast for you (and presumably the rest of the class). While with a podcast, one could rewind and replay, if the line of reasoning that has been recorded in this static media is still incomprehensible, it is of less value than attendance in the first place. It's amazing what a little clarification or an alternatative perspective on a concept can bring to the class, or others!
However, as a graduate student, there are times when I have to work. There are also times when I just can't get every last bit of math off the boards before it's erased. This is where having a study group of friends is your first recourse, but a podcast could also help.
Frankly, if someone is bright enough to pick up the necessary content of the course solely from the podcasts, then good for them. To the lesser mortals, attendence is the tried and true recourse. And to the slackers: it won't help much. :)
So I attend a private Christian university, Northwest University, in Washington State and recently one of my theology professors started this. The class normally meets MWF for an hour. However, he split the class into thirds and has us meeting once a week for discussion based off of the lectures we download, listen to, and sign a slip saying we listened to it and supplying at least one question from the three lectures we listened to.
This may be hard to do at a larger university, given that discussions would be difficult to do with a larger class base. However, this may give some idea. We just finished our first week of school, but so far it seems to work pretty well. It allows us to discuss instead of listen to lecture in class.
Xhentil Do'ana
I agree with some of the other posters. Don't worry about it. The good students and bad students *always8 find ways to self select themselves. Poor students will use it as a poor study habit crutch, good students will use it to reinforce learning and improve their grade.
Beside, what is there to prevent slackers from paying for lecture notes anyway? Even if you delay podcasts, there is no guaruntee you can force people to show up, so don't worry about it.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
My university, the University of Canberra (Australia) already does this for a number of classes. Some are video taped and others are audio taped, both of which are then distributed online in the same week as the lecture. At my last university - the Australian National University - *all* of my lectures were audio taped and the tapes made available in the library the same week as the lecture.
I don't understand why a university would demand that its students attend every lecture? Here in Australia a significant proportion of students also work casually or part-time to support their education. Others work full-time and attend university part-time. Others have family commitments. Distributing taped copies of lectures online (or at least in the library) simply facilitates learning for these individuals who have as much of a right to attend university as anyone else. Certainly this results in some individuals skipping lectures because they can watch them online, but how is that actually a problem? Those individuals are still required to complete all the assessment items and exams in order to pass, and if they're able to do that, they've obviously learned as much as the students that attend lectures. IMO, universities should embrace the technologies available to them and I'm glad mine does.
An attendence policy will keep them from skipping class....not timing the release of the lecture videos. It sounds as if you're attempting to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail.
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
They're just mp3's... they were around before the "iPod" and will be when the "iPod" fades away in the dustbin of long forgotten history. For example, http://www.teachco.com/ has been around a lot longer than the "iPod" and offers a pretty good selection of university level lectures on almost any subject. Although, it's preferrable to order the dvd-video for the math and science courses. The Modern Scholar also offers "podcasts" as well, google their name it should be easy enough.
The only motivation to force students to attend class seems to be some sort of puritanical argument or something like "We had to attend class, so why shouldn't we force the students to?".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Man I hate university / colleges.
The real question is this: If a bad student can watch all the lectures and do so well on an exam, what were they really teaching you in the class anyways? Did they not prove they knew it by passing the exam?
Attendence requirements are another way of saying, "It's not really about your education". The real question should be which students are smart enough to crunch for an exam 24 hours in advance and pass.
Ace
It is clear from many posts that slashdooter have had their fair share of poor lecturers. This is why so many post about the reudnancy of attending classes. Clearly these lectures ar enot adding to their learning experience.
Good lectures bring together reading material, illuminate problems and identify themes to bring the course together in a cohesive fashion.
The best lectures do this while responding to student verbal and non-verbal cues (eg student questions, puzzled looks, bordeom, etc)
Give the guy a break - there is a legitimate reason for providing copies of lectures. They support the student who has attended the lecture, been engaged but did not get all the notes, or in hindsight is confused about a point
I see lots of posts about why attendance shouldn't matter as long as students are learning the material. I completely agree. BUT what most people don't know is that attendance is required for state and federal funding. Even many private schools get funding from the government. For much of the money the schools must report on general class attendance. If fewer students go to classes the university gets less money. So there actually is reason (besides the education) that schools need high classroom attendance.
Developers: We can use your help.
I mostly agree. Having taught university courses I try to make it worth the students time to come and participate but I make sure to base none of my grading on attendance. On the other hand students feel it is their money to waste and don't realize that they are only paying part of their education, my my university only 1/3, because of private donors and state tax money. How do you get these kids to avoid wasting resources? Personally, I tell them to drop if they aren't doing the work.
I am glad that, unlike some administrators, you don't think that just watching a video of the class is a valid substitute for being there.
However, I think that you will find there is not much you can do to make the bad students do the right thing. In high school they constantly attempted to force students to learn when they did not want to and they seldom had good results. I would say that you should help the good students to the best of your ability and give the bad students the best encouragement, support, and advice that you can. After that let them sink or swim.
Lastly, not doing something to help good students simply because it could make it easier for slackers is wrong because it punishes the good students. Having said that, I do not know if having the podcasts out there will really help anyone or not. They would not have been much help to me except when I was sick, but some people may find them useful.
"You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink; you can take a student to school but you can't make him think."
-Unknown
-WolvesOfTheNight
As a college student, I can only inform you about the conditions at my university, and in the classes I've taken. Also, IANAS (I am not a statistician) but I can say that a high percentage of the professors I've had, and the professors my friends have had, don't ask questions, or encourage any interaction from the audience at all. In fact, many I have frown upon it.
In stadium classes, for example, interaction has been deemed impractical. Most professors simply lecture, and people with questions are forced to wait until afterwards and scramble for the few moments the professor is cleaning up, or attempt to make office hours, which consist of a small hour or two hour window that usually falls during one of your other classes. In a class like this, what's the difference if the students are there or not? If they have questions, they just try to make office hours anyway.
In smaller, but still lower level classes, interaction between the student and teacher may be encouraged by the professor, but is usually never reciprocated by the student. Most of my classes, the students just sit there silent when the teacher asks a question, and the professor is forced to answer themselves. I assume this has come about due to the abundance of unfriendly or quiet teachers, as well as the fear of getting questions wrong, or the fear of peer ridicule. Usually, I'm the only one in my classes who even speaks to the professor, let alone answer questions. Again, what's the difference? I'd rather have those quiet people at home anyway, so the teacher pays more attention to me.
Only in the higher level, VERY small classes have I found the reverse to be true. Here, interaction is the point of the entire class. If there are only 10 people in your class, and you don't get it, comprehension has just dropped 10%. (Can you tell I'm a Math/Computer Science major?) Of course, in these classes, such a podcast doesn't make sense, but I assume it's not the sort of class the news post is asking about.
Of course, if the professor in question is a good professor, the engaging, interactive, interesting, imaginative type who we always want as teachers but never seem to get, they shouldn't have a problem drawing people to their actual lectures anyway. People should WANT to come, and the ones that don't want to probably shouldn't be there anyway: they just sit in the back, and cause disturbances when their cell phones ring or they spill their Vente Mocha Decaf Frappichinos.
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
How can you give them a pod to take home if they don't physically present their host organism?
Seastead this.
Back in the days, some professors I knew would have been most disturbed by a camera in the classroom. One of those professors was deriving Ohm's law and got I=R/V. He then erased everything from the board, picked up his lecture notes and derived the law again. Again he got I=R/V. I would have loved to have that on video.
Another professor I had for one of my math courses had such a heavy Chinese accent that some students asked to write on the board whatever he was saying. He was happy to oblige. The problem was that nobody in the class could read Chinese. At least that's what it looked like from where I was sitting.
I'd say just make those lecture podcasts available online shortly after the lecture. Restrict access only to students registered for that course. Attendance is not going to be affected by this. Those with a habit of skipping classes will continue on their course. This does not define them as bad students: bad grades do. After all, you still let students to take their textbooks home. Think about it: this might encourage them to actually read the book and not come to the next lecture.
Who is paying for the lecture, you or the professor? Last time I checked, it was the students who are paying tuition.
If the students don't feel it's worth their time to attend class (even though they are paying for it), it's the professors who are not doing their job.
So post the Podcasts as soon as they're available, and be happy that even the "bad students" are paying the "bad professors" and your salary.
I think you need to talk to the faculty member(s) in question first, and see how they want it handled. They can be incredibly touchy about things that might seem trivial to most other people.
Additionally (and more importantly), faculty may have knowledge directly relevant to how you end up controlling access to this. For example - there are a couple of classes in our department that use certain software that has been released under very specific and strict rules for use in our classes, but no where else. It is to the companies' advantage to have the students exposed to their actual production systems; but they are quite adamant that it not be available to the wider world (or, more importantly, to their competitors).
#DeleteChrome
It's quality of education that's at risk. It may sound cool to blow off the classes then just cram before the final but what's important is what's retained years later. Do you really want a doctor that blew off his classes but managed to pass his tests by cramming? Even with software I find I can get enough knowledge to get by quick but if I don't do the work I don't retain it. What worries me is we are becoming a nation of slackers. Blow off the classes, use cell phones and PDA to cheat so you don't have to learn the material. We're rapidly falling behind even third world countries in education. A share of it has to go to people avoiding the learning process. People graduate high school without learning to read. Others get engineering degrees without knowing the math. The slacking is risking our health and safety and we're going to keep having to import more technical people because the quality of our domestic ones isn't adequate. If you can't be bothered to go to class you shouldn't go to college and you should fail. Save your parents some bucks and get a nice on line degree so you can still party and sleep in. Just avoid medical and engineering degrees. Pick something safe where competency doesn't matter, try a lawyer or a politcian. Hell apparently in this country you can be borderline illiterate and still become President.
The primary advantage for doing this is to help students that missed the lecture (and for that matter the lecterer in that he or she doesn't have to redo the lecture for the absentee students later on). The students who attended the class aren't going to get much out of the "podcast". They were there! They could record the session's audio if they wanted. I suppose they could record video too. They could also take notes.
If the reason you're planning on doing this isn't to help the student that missed the class because he/she was ill, had another commitment at class time, or simply didn't feel like going, someone in your organisation needs to buy a clue.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
You should be asking the students what they want. They are your customers. The customer is always right. You are a vendor of educational services. Provide some service, dammit! Don't make your customers jump through hoops they don't want or need.
"...and have been charged with posting pod-casts of class lectures on the internet."
:P
Those are some pretty serious chages. I hope they don't convict. The students would end up getting sentenced to lame lectures online and would not learn!
If you want to ensure students come to class, take attendance and make it part of the grade. Posting podcasts (or not) probably won't be as large a determining factor in whether students go to class as will the amount of beer or pot they consume 12 hours beforehand.
We have been archiving IV courses for about three years and then making those lectures available via our learning platform. The faculty had the argument that it would encourage students to miss classes. After using it for one year, we polled the faculty and their attitude had changed. The good students were using it to reinforce the material covered in class and the attendance has not been an issue.
In our case, attendance policies were left up to the individual faculty member. We also record every IV class but the instructor has control over releasing the archive (by default all released) - they can turn off archives at the course level or by date. The institution gets to say it records all lectures but the faculty has control over students access.
If this is not already, it will be expected by students in the future.
If you really want people to attend the lectures, then just give out chocolate frogs. I had a lecturer who would give out chocolate frogs to people answering his questions correctly. The hundred sleeping students would quickly wake up and start participating with the mention of a Freddo Frog.
Just post them right away. Bad, lazy students will be bad and lazy regardless of whether or not they attend class. If you hold off on putting the videos of lectures up you're punishing the students who actually care about the class(es) because of idiots who don't care.
In my economics class last semester the professor posted videos of all the lectures, but rather than on a regular schedule (every day ect.) she posted every 2 weeks or so, especially a week or two before an exam. This encouraged attending class because it would be overly time consuming to sit and watch every single lecture, having missed them all, but at the same time would cut a student a break if they had had to miss a class here and there, as well as providing a resource to review any confusing material. I thought this was a fair strategy that struck the balance you seek well.
Aren't they at uni to learn their selected field? Why should we be testing their ability to attend lectures? Lectures are a tool.
Well, my college has an attendence policy. If you don't come to at least 75% of lectures, you automatically fail the course. Just do the same on your own. You have the right to do so, so why not? It's the single easiest way to get people to come to class.
Two scenarios:
Scenario 1)
Lectures are mostly one-way, with minimal class participation other than maybe a brief Q&A session over the last homework assignment.
In this case, there's no reason NOT to delay posting.
Scenario 2)
Lectures are really a classroom exercise and other students miss out if you are not there to participate
In this case, grade on attendance and/or in-class contribution, but make the podcast available right away anyways.
Remember, students occasionally have "real life" issues that keep them from attending a particular lecture. The faster they can get the material they missed, the better.
Also remember who is paying the bill, and I'm not talking about the government or the alumni association here.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I teach networking in various courses in a Polytechnic - think of a College including degree level. I tried this a few years ago - and have continued recently. I had students bringing recorders to class & I thought why not do it myself - they seem to want a recording.
I was concerned about students missing classes. I monitored attendance carefully and found that the non-attendance didn't change. I also found that very very few people who downloaded the material actually remembered listening to it when I did a survey at the end of the course (obsessive compulsive downloading disorder?). It really seemed like a complete waste of time.
I've recently started providing them online again as an extra resource for the on-site students. But the podcast (and webcast with ppt & video) is made primarily for some distance students. Again - attendance isn't suffering (on-site) but I'm not sure that it is really used that much by students - yeah I can see they are downloading but I'm not convinced they use them. I'll try another survey later and check but casual conversation gives me the impression they're just collecting stuff.
Once they hear me babble in real life they get the gist and don't need to re-hear every word again.
I'm not knocking the idea - hey I'm doing it! I am just not convinced it's worth much effort. The only reason I'm providing it really is because I have to produce it for the off-site students.
Hi -
My God, why does it matter if the students physically attend class or not? When I was in school back in the late 1970's some of our U classes were actually offered live on cable TV, so you could "attend" to class in your living room and underwear.
TWR
Unless you have an active camera person, how can you tell what parts of the chalk board to focus on? And with the resolution you are broadcasting at, is the chalk board even going to be legible? In some of my favorite classes some of the most interesting and informative parts of the class were the diagrams that the prof drew on the board. How can you accurately film those, esp. if the prof starts using side boards etc.
I guess they could upload the images or not use the sideboards, but I doubt very many professors are going to go out of their way to accommodate lazy students...
Monstar L
I am one of those good students. The last two quarters I got on the dean's list. I am also 34 years old. I prefer full access to all notes, podcasts, etc as early as possible, so I can choose to go to class or not. I pay in full for all my classes, and feel that I should be the final arbitor of whether I get anything out of actually being there.
This whole 'keep the bad students from skipping' is a ridiculous stance in the first place. There is an obvious correlation between class attendance and overall grades in most cases. It is irritating as all get out when I get into a class where a TA or professor decides to play nanny, and take attendance, or restrict access to class material because 'students will skip'. All you're doing by restricting access is making students like me, who do go to class and do get excellent grades, jump through a massive number of irritating hoops.
It's college, not a babysitting program. Whatever happened to personal responsibility of the student to get to class? We're all adults there.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
It's a flash vid from a conference but I think he's got a few good points (and some I don't agree - but worth listening too).
I had a professor that recorded and uploaded every one of his lectures online as well as all of the notes. Lectures were posted immediately after class; notes were posted weeks in advance. It was great for days when I felt like crap and didn't feel that I could make it to class. Also, this class was at 12pm, so sometimes I would skip the class to do some last minute studying for an exam at 2pm.
The lectures were placed into a website whose access was restricted and only students taking the class could access it.
Everyone appreciated being able to download the lectures, not only for the reason of being unable to show up (or in some cases, just not feeling like it) but also to play back a specific point that we missed so that we could clarify it in our own notes.
If you're going to skip class and download the lecture later, then you're still going to end up sitting down, downloading the file, listening to an hour long lecture while taking notes on it. So if you really care about your grade, what's the point of skipping and downloading the lecture later? It's more convenient to just show up to class (or if you don't care about your grade, not show up to class and not download the lecture). It doesn't make sense to label this as a temptation to skip class.
Also, if you use diagrams then audio lectures alone will be of limited help. Granted, the class I took was anatomy, so this point depends on the class I guess.
Finally, unless the class is really easy (or the student is very smart), I doubt that anyone can just sit through 15 hours of continuous lecture and still ace an exam right after.
I want to listen to these podcasts... I already love MIT Opencourse lecture notes. Its great for people that want to learn, but lack the bank to take the classes.
I just take the CLEP for each subject I really don't feel intrested in, and plan only on taking the classes I WANT when I start college.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
I suppose, though, it depends on the class. The way I see it, there's no substitute for actual participation. If the class you're talking about doesn't involve participation, then I don't see the harm (it then wouldn't be much different than an online course that many schools are offering). But if the course involves any participation, either institute an attendance policy, or start grading participation.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
It is disappointing to see posts in here referring to students who do not attend lectures as being "bad". Students have a lot to deal with now: many have to work at least part, if not full time, to support themselves. It is unfortunate, but a reality that some of them are going to have to miss classes due to work commitments. And surely, would not these students make better potential employees when they have finished? By forcing them to attend a class, how are you helping them? Seems to me that this is a form of punishment, not incentive.
There are other reasons as to why students don't attend lectures: one-way delivery of information is not an appropriate form of communication for a lot of students, and mostly doesn't provide anythying that you can't get from reading the text book. I personally do not hold a traditional "lecture" as such anymore, but rather a short presentation from myself about the key points for this weeks material, followed by class discussion topics or some other form of interactive exercise. And yes, the students do all participate, and they also do very well when it comes assessment time.
But, I hear you ask, what about those students who cannot make it to lectures? How do they benefit from your lecture "style"? Directly, they don't. However, for those people, we have lecture notes, quizes, and other material available on-line. Mostly, the people who do not come to class do so because of other commitments (work), and not because they are "bad". These students who work are very well aware of the consequences of failing due to the fact that they are in the "real" world. For them, failure really isn't an option, so they find the time to do the work. They may not always do brilliantly, but they rarely fail. In my experience, maybe 1 out of 100 students fails to do any work and subsequently fail the unit. But there are usually other issues in play, such as they are from another country, or they currently lack maturity (some students are only 17 years old for their entire first year of university). Does this make them bad? I would say not.
Bad students? I would say the problem is bad lecturers. The make-up of the student population is changing, and lecturers / professors need to change the way they operate if we are going to maintain the quality of higher education. Technology can help in education, but needs to be used to support a better style of teaching, not to supplement an outdated model.
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
When I was a college professor, I considered each of my classes to be a community of learners (this was before the phrase "learning communities" was popular, btw). I told the students that they needed to attend class because 1) they couldn't participate in the discussions if they didn't and 2) they were an integral part of the community. I also told them that the discussions were the heart and soul of the class--not the exams or papers, and certainly not the grade. Students could certainly read all of the class material on their own, and they could certainly hear from others NOT in the class various viewpoints about the class readings. But they couldn't participate in the discussions if they weren't in class.
Often, I used in-class writing at the beginning and/or at the end of a class session so that I had a record of class participation grades (not all students feel comfortable talking in class, but they can get a lot out of the class and support their fellow learners even if they are relatively silent during the discussions). Students could not earn an "A" in the class if they didn't accumulate enough points for class participation, though they could still pass the class if they missed all of the classes but did well on the exams and papers (I don't recall that this ever happened, btw). If they had done the reading, they could easily earn all of the points on a start-of-class reading quiz, which usually involved some short answers (often in creative form) meant to generate discussion. At the end of class, I asked that students write about what went well for them during the class session or what concept or idea troubled them, etc. They easily earned the points for this kind of in-class exercise, too, and I quickly received feedback on how the class session went (when necessary, I would begin the next class session by discussing a point that a number of students struggled with during the last class session).
Nearly all of my students took these in-class writings seriously. They knew that they could easily receive the points, so they were free to test out ideas, challenge themselves, and so on.
What I'm trying to get at here is that I considered my students to be responsible adults and tried always to treat them as such (for example, rather than imposing rules regarding tardiness, I asked that we keep two or three seats empty by the door so that students who occasionally needed to arrive to class late or leave class early could do so without interrupting others). Perhaps not surprisingly, class attendance was usually very good--in part because the subject matter was meaningful to students (I taught humanities-oriented courses and encouraged students to connect the material with their everyday lives, which they rather easily did), and in part because, I believe, the students felt that they were part of a community of learners who took ideas seriously and who were themselves taken seriously.
So, what about the students who did in fact miss class a lot? Sometimes, they couldn't help it, as was the case with students who suffered medically or in some other way had problems that prevented their being in class. For these students, I tended to relax or in some other way deal with the participation requirement. For the others? I let them deal with the consequences of their actions. I didn't take it personally that they missed class, nor did I take it personally if they didn't do well in the class as a result. I cannot think of a student who missed many classes for no good reason and yet did well in the class, but so what if one or two did? Why make rules based upon the relatively few students who will refuse to participate as adult learners when they are truly invited to be responsible members of the class community? Why not, instead, help the majority of students (who do attend class) and work with students who have legitimate reasons for not being in class?
Bottom line? Post the podcast lectures, inviting students to have access to the class material and thus to be in a position to empower th
There is an easier solution, make attendance part of your grade... Have attendance sheets at the entrances/exits of the room. Keep them out for about 10 minutes into the class and then collect them. It doesn't need to be a big part of the grade, maybe 5%.
Make attendance 5% and I won't show up. Half a letter grade is meaningless to me compared to the time better doing something else, especially if I know I can do the work without the lecture notes. Make it 25% and I can let the work slide some to show up for easy points. 10-15%, I might show up, depending on how well I can do the work. Even one letter grade isn't that big a deal; people care about grades for scholarships, not resumes.
If you require attendance, an option would be to require that anyone who misses the lecture download the Podcast and write up a 1000 word essay on what the lecture covered. This ensures that the student actually did listen to the lecture. If the student fails to write the essay, attendance points can be deducted. The essay could be emailed to the professor, a TA, etc. One of the previous classes I had last semester did this.
This is a university where students pay big bucks to attend and the author is worried about truancy?
... Roll Tape...
There is no negative here. In fact universities should do more telelearning on campus with virtual classrooms and lecture halls.
I mean, how much time and effort is spent per day simply traversing campus? Two hours here, an hour and a half there, walk five miles a day with a load of baggage.
Wouldn't it be better to stay in a comfortable environment with the resources of the university at your fingertips? Less tiring? More time to study and learn?
Video conferencing? Doesn't every campus have high speed networks these days?
Podcasts are a step in the right direction and a concept ripe for expansion.
Good for professors too. They only have to do a lecture once.
Biology 101 "cell division"?
It does trouble me that the author is concerned about truancy and tardiness, good students and bad. It is as though teaching and learning takes a back seat to regimented compliance to rules and protocol. That the podcast perk should only be for 'good' students.
I'd prefer to let knowledge of subject matter determine a students ranking, not how they attained it or when.
I work for a university in the southern hemisphere (sorry, don't want to say which or where as I am not an official spokesperson [although may not be too difficult to find out {insert curse here}]) and here we make all lecture material available, regardless of attendance. The main reason for this is similar to the handicap issue; a student may have some sort of handicap/circumstance for him/her (it) not attending. This includes all electronic copies of lecture notes, practicals, tutorials, solutions, extra notes made in class, videos, links, extra reading material, podcasts, etc.
Personally, I rarely attended lectures. Sometimes the lecturer would just read off the material, and, I'm sorry, but I can do that in my own time. I'd sit at home, read the notes/extra reading and do plenty of exercises in the same time that some dude would stand there and babble on, boring everybody stupid. This is not always the case and there are certainly sometimes where you cannot afford to miss a lecture (you want a 'feel' for the lecturer's 'attack').
All this said, only staff (all university staff) and students enrolled in that subject may view this material.
.
If you really need a deterrent, make attendance affect their grade slightly. Like 5-10%. Allow 3 or 4 free classes free a semester.
If the professor/school wants attendance, you really need to build it into policy. Not encumber the technical solution with so much baggage as to make it too much hassle to use. That's counterproductive.
Finally -- somebody with a clue. Pity you're (probably) not involved in the administration of higher education.
If truancy was that much of a problem, or if it became that much of a problem after the introduction of lecture podcasts, the solution is fairly simple: start taking attendance and start giving "participation grades" based on whether a student shows up or not. If it's really that important, have a TA sit in the front of class as people come in and check their school-issued photo ID if there are concerns that people are going to sign in for one another.
This is purely a policy issue, and is independent of the podcast question. If students are really that hell-bent on not coming to class, it's a pretty simple matter to send one guy to class with a digital recorder, have him record the lecture, and then email the recording to everyone else who wants it. A "bootleg lecture," if you will. Given that pocket dictation recorders are smaller than a pack of gum (you can record with one pretty well if you put it in your shirt pocket and sit in the front row, and don't move around), there is really no way to stop this -- unless you want to frisk every student for recording devices before you get started. And remember that if you let people use or even bring laptops into the lecture hall, they could easily be recording the whole thing (even videotaping it! the horror!) for those evil "truants" to review later on.
Honestly, if someone can get the same benefit of your class just by listening to a few podcasts or watching some video tapes, then you have no business calling yourself a teacher. You might as well just record the lectures, email them to everyone on the class roster, and save everyone involved a whole lot of time. If you teach well, then your lectures ought to have some value in themselves, aside from what could be gleaned from a simple recording -- otherwise, why bother going to all the work of doing a face-to-face? Just read your script into the camera and save everyone the aggravation of showing up.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Educational institutions should not be inconveniencing good students for the "benefit" of poor students.
(Assuming that forcing them to attend lectures is to their benefit).
Major
hmm...isn't this called online learning? I guess the 50,000 graduates of Phoenix Online have skipped class and didn't do work. I think you need to pay more attention to your model of learning and change from giving tests as a measure of standards and move to project based learning or some other form of measuring how much a student has learned. This is 2006, not 1970. It's time for education to change. VIVA LA EDUCATION REVOLUTION!
For the most part, they are adults. If the professor is concerned about attendence, they can take roll. If the goal is for the student to learn the material, then how the student learns the material is immaterial.
"Good" students aren't students who show up to class; "Bad" students aren't the ones who skip out. "Good" students are ones who understand the material and get the job done, "bad" students are the ones who don't.
Many of the students who are in college are there because they're either paying their way or they've received student loans/grants, or their parents help out. If they don't perform to acceptable standards, the money well dries up in many - if not most - cases. What I'm trying to say is that for the "bad" students, this problem should be self-correcting. If the podcasts don't give them enough to pass the class and they rely on it, they'll eliminate themselves from the degree program by underperforming.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Everyone seems to be saying that any learning is good learning, so why not give everyone access.
However, I think that as a teaching institution part of the job is to encourage good learning habits in the students. The most valuable part of a University degree can be learning how to learn, and you get more out of it with the help of the teaching staff. If it were me I'd make the lectures available after the corresponding assignment is due, but allow immediate access to any who has a good reason to have missed class (e.g. unwell).
Lectures should be made available BEFORE the class so that students can come prepared to DISCUSS the material and not simply absorb it. I wish I had this in college so I could listen to my upcoming lectures during lunch or re-listen to them while I'm running. My class time would have been more interesting.
Knowledge is valuable. Ignorance is dangerous. Censorship is unacceptable. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10
If you want people to attend the lectures and participate, a few pop quizzes will do. Also, some professors are understandably concerned that they have spent their entire careers collecting and developing their material, and why should it be put up where other professors can grab it.
First to the people who say it's unnecessary to use incentives, I say they're wrong. I think it definitely boosts attendance at lectures, and that it's a Good Thing when lots of students attend lectures. Having them online is also good, as it enables them to revise later, and will reduce dependance on hand-written notes made during lectures (which are a distraction). I think helping people (particularly young people) to make good decisions is a good thing.
Lectures are better than just watching a podcast because they're interactive - one can interrupt and ask a question (of a decent lecturer, anyway)
In the department where I work, lots of lecturers use small assessment pieces during the lecture to encourage attendance. Usually it's a small test (more suited to empirical subjects - I work in engineering) that covers the material from last week's lecture. This has the added benefit of encouraging students to revise as they go. Typically each test is only worth about 1% of their total grade, but combined that's about 10% (there's not a test *every* week, and usually students can knock off their worst grade) so most students come.
Then it's just a matter of making the lecture engaging enough that the students stick around after the test...
I'm an engineer in a large US company. I've been with this company for over 10 years. I attend a physical class every 2 years or so. All my training comes from online classes (mostly internal). I know it is not the same as a college student, but the medium is the same. The point is, I benefit from the online class more than a physical class. A lot more. I can stop and repeat the video. Or I can pause, do a google search on the subject and go back. If it is too much, I can retake a simpler class. It works.
I agree that the motivation is different. I'm a professional and I know what I'm looking for to help me in my job. But why can't college students have a similar motivation? why can't we give them the opportunity to pick their 'medium' preference and as long as they pass the exams, then why not? if they can't pass, I bet they will start attending. College is way too expensive for most to accept a low grade. But if they do well in exams, then more power to them.
This is the online generation. We email, chat, shop, work, entertain online.... and yes, we can also learn online.
MIT, Stanford and UC Berkley have been doing this for years. Years. Those are the three I personally know about, and where those heavy-hitters go, others are sure to follow, so it's likely there are many more. (A little-known, short-lived institution called Ars Digita University was the first to do it; MIT was the first major player.) So why not go and study their systems? You and your employer are not treading virgin territory, so, before designing your system, it would be prudent to understand the paths other smart people and institutions have already taken when facing the same challenges.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I had always thought it to be pretty odd that teachers focus so much energy on noneducational issues like truancy. I always had the idea that if somebody doesn't want to be there why bother to drag them down your course. A person commits to something or doesn't, not to mention each person has unique needs.
FYI: I graduated community college 3 times because they had: weekend, evening, online, online-hybrid, 12hr open labs, selfpaced, and distance learning programs. There isn't a state college (I know of) in California that has any of these things, especially in the Junior and Senior level courses. I also wonder if Universities are taking advantage of modern mediums for delivery of educational programs as the Community Colleges and Independant Colleges are.
One thing is certian there are many people in this situation. We need the guidance of good instructors but it is so unfourtinate that so many instructors are bound by the rules of tradition. This little quandry has left me thinking: Ill have to quit my job or become incompent, or disinterested enough to get fired. Find a night job, that fits in my career. Or I can try one of those Independant Colleges like University of Pheonix or ITT.
My biggest concern is that these educational programs, especially in the state sponsored colleges, are ignoring the general public. And here I was idealistically thinking education was something everyone can persue. A little side note: in here in California there are strict restrictions on expendatures of State and Federal money spent on tuitions at Independant Colleges, no money is available under most circumstances.
I guess it's obvious I can't get over my addiction to the accessibility of information. I don't want to jump foreward to find that it was only an illusion. I can't handle a closed environment, with few resourses to help me move foreward.
I guess my answer to the teachers question is: Times are always changing. If one can't get with it then they are dragging themself down and the people around them.
I am going to work harder now.
You might be interested in the following article: Will the University Survive?
It points to several resources regarding podcats and higher education.
And the RIAA will make you a rich man! You're essentially trying to control the distrubution of your class in digital form so that only "good" students can download it. Much the same way the RIAA tries to control distribution based on pay. Did anyone ever see Ferris Buhlers(sp) day off? Remember the part where the lecturer was pre-recorded and the students had tape recorders in their sted? Consider this as the same, sans the analog mediums (air, tape).
What is your University's policy on the handicapped? What about those 'good' students (as per above comments) that are unable to attend for a week or two because they lost a leg (or something)? Should they be unable to retrieve material because they did not attend?
Sure, you may have some really cool software (likely expensive and time consuming) to track students and their individual needs, but, in my limited experience, there is always a case that has not been handled before. By the time the student chases this all down, as it is usually a case of guilty until proven innocent, the semester can be up. Then what about any legal issues attached to this.
The university I work for by-passes all of this by making everything available.
.
As long as they learn the material, it's immaterial whether they attend class or not. Different people learn differently. At CalTech (long time back), I attended every single class without fail. My roommate attended very few, kind of spent most of his study time in a psychotropic/psychodelic haze, if you know what I mean. So...he graduated with a 4.3 average (4.0 = A; 4.3 = A+). I didn't. In Physics classes for the first two years, Tech had class notes (done by a paid grad student who attended the lectures) available for everyone within 24 hours after the lecture. This was fantastic, and was helpful to everyone, regular attendees or not. You're trying to help develop someone's mind - give them the resources and forget the petty attendance stats.
seriously you need to understand learning is about just that learning, not attendance or something to support your ego, trying to fail students that don't show to your class kind of eliminates the whole point of education.
you don't have audio of every little 8:00 am meeting or seminare, get used to paying attention when it isnt totaly easy or get ready for a life of "would you like fries with that?"
As a graduate student and college instructor, I would argue that one thing that students will lose from skipping the lecture is the horizontal social connections between students. Even if there's no discussion or opportunity to stop the teacher and ask questions, attending class gives students the opportunity to forge social relationships before and after class that allows them to compare notes and share experiences. Students could time-shift a lecture and discuss it later, but it seems less likely, and there's something to be said for talking when the lecture is still fresh in their minds. I also wonder how attentive students would be watching a podcast compared to sitting in a lecture hall. Sharing the same physical space demands at least the appearance of attentiveness.
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
In language classes this is especially true. It is very difficult to teach yourself a language, and the time spent in class is important to give you practice time and experience with the language in a different environment. It is concievable (though unlikely) that a student could learn this elsewhere, but in that case it would be something that is very difficult to test.
Qxe4
At the post-seondary level it should always be left up to the student whether or not he/she chooses to attend a class and should be of little concern to the institution. The overall idea behind education is to learn. If the student is still able to learn the course material without attending lectures than so be it. Give them their lectures online. Hell, it might even lower the class sizes, benefitting those who do choose to attend...
What exactly is the point of the podcast anyway?
If it is for review purposes, perhaps the entire thing could be recorded, and editted at home to be a much smaller review. Then, only those who attended the class would truly understand it.
Or, better yet. Don't record the lecture. Record a special post-lecture review (maybe even the last five or ten minutes of the class) that reviews the material. Generally, such things are only good as a review, and not as a lecture itself.
Have you read my journal today?
"A better way to encourage attendance is (easy) semi-frequent surprise pop quizzes (like 'What was the topic of last lecture?') worth say 5-10% of the final grade."
I find being the person who pays the bill works best.
Quiz your students at the end of the lecture over what they just learned. At that point, it doesn't matter how or when the student downloads the lecture because ultimately, the student's grade depends on their daily attendance. But requiring class attendance defeats the point of a podcast, doesn't it? The student pays the university to take your course and has, in essense, paid you to create the podcast and has purchased the right to download it. Why does it matter if the student is physically present? The student may live 40 miles away; with gas approaching $3 a gallon in many places sometimes attending the lecture physically is infeasible. You provide the video and email support outside of class, and your job is done. If the student cannot get by on the podcast alone, he'll come to class on his own or fail the course. Really, what control do you have over that process?
I work in EDU also so this isn't an unfamiliar issue to me.
I look at it this way, kids that are 'bad students' will skip classes no matter what. They'll use other student's notes, they'll use pod casts, or (like me) they'll just skip classes to do something more interesting (like fix computers). This is why I'm now an IT Manager and not a professor I guess.. too many skipped classes.
The reality is, you can't limit access to the pod casts. It's completely un-reasonable to only allow students who have been to the lectures.. to allow only them to download the pod-casts. What if the kid is sick? What if they had something more important happened like some very 'close' but not close enough dying? (I got in trouble once for missing a speech when my Grandfather died. No make ups in Public Speaking)
The reality is.. If kids skip classes and they pass the tests by just listening to the pod casts.. good for them. Either your class is too damn easy or they don't have any need to be there. College is supposed to be about the whole educational experience but at the end of the day it's about passing the classes and getting 'the paper'. The future employer wants to know that you got X out of Y GPA and that you finished. We, on the inside, like to believe it's about the educational experience and about expanding our perceptions and horizions, and about building character and a dozen other things but unless you're planning a career in Education it's about getting that paper and moving (in your education or in your career).
The other reality is that some classes can't be passed by just listening (or watching grainy video) podcasts. It helps being in Math class and seeing the work on the board. Sure, some kids can pod-cast and read the book and figure out dif-eq but I'd guarantee that the ones most likely to skip classes won't be in that group. At the very least, it's safe to say that some if not most kids can't do it (pass without class). The kids should be warned, in no uncertain terms, that pod casts are not replacements for sitting in class and asking questions. If they fail, they'll learn. If they fail, they'll tell other kids how they got screwed by just pod-casting.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
I am currently a student at a major Canadian University.
I have had podcasts offered in several lectures. For these lectures slide show presentations were also provided. Though the podcasts did offer insight into the class discussion they were not useful beyond that.
My attendance has never been stellar. I missed more then a few classes and only once tried using the podcast as a resource. It is slow, boring, and not overly informative.
It would take the same amout of time to attend the class with the added value of being able to participate in the discussion and ask questions.
I personally didn't find it to be much use. Nobody in the class used it as a substitute for the class. Attendence was no different in those classes then others. I have a rather small set of classmates and there was no change from the usual attendance.
I guess some of the keeners may have used it when they miss a class but I doubt any significant portion of the students would use this resource.
It is always nice for the option though.
Cheers,
Joel
Burn Bright or Fade Away
To all those people asking why not let the podcasts out to everyone. The answer is two-fold.
One, the lecture is being paid for. Letting out a podcast means means even people who did not pay for the podcast could hear it. The podcast is not the main source of income, they just want to supply it as a help. Therefore, they are looking to let it go, if it could be secured.
Two, the lectures are--in a sense--secondary to the college setup. The college has an interest, both economically and academically, to have the college as a place of learning. The lectures are one of the main sources of draw, and without them being centralized to a campus, there would be less people there. This would hurt these interests.
There is a third reason, not from the college's standpoint, but from a students. If the material is the same, the college would simply podcast the same lecture year after year, until forced to change it. With podcasts being of a live lecture, the material is always new, and hopefully incorporates the "latest" advances in that particular subject.
Have you read my journal today?
At my university we have recordings of lectures available to download. Generally I don't use them but they are handy if I have missed the lecture or want to go over it again at home. The kids who skip the lectures and say they will watch it later generally don't, but some people I know will stay home if they only have 1 class and do it there so they don't have to make the trip to uni.
We only have access to the lectures of the courses we are enrolled in. At my uni attendence is not required for lectures, only for tutorials and labs, so people skipping class will only indirectly affect their marks.
And now a quick plug for the software my uni uses and developed: Lectopia: http://ilectures.uwa.edu.au/
Speaking as an educator, I don't see what the technical problem is. It sounds like you're looking for a DRM-solution to a simple human problem. Professors post lecture notes, powerpoint slides, and all sorts of material for students. A and B grade students take these as supplements to the in-class experience, C students will be inconsistent, and even D and F students will "earn" their grades. Little will change with podcasts. So, make the podcasts widely available and leave the policing of attendance to the teachers (as has almost always been the case before).
If attendance is such a major concern, then the teachers need to motivate the students to be present. For mega-lectures, require attendanced, sign-in sheets, documented excuses, point deductions for unexcused absences, etc. are common solutions to absenteeism. You can do the same thing for small classes, or make the class interactive and interesting. You'd be surprised what regular Q&A, engaging discussion, exercises, etc. can do for the morale of a class.
We automatically record around 70 lectures per week using the Lectopia System http://lectopia.uwa.edu.au/ and haven't noticed any major drops in attendance in any of those lectures. One of our departments, the School of Computing, did a study of the use of Lectopia across a number of units and found there was no discernable drop in attendance at all compared to the control classes that hadn't used the system.
What we find is that although any recording is only second-best to a good-quality live interactive lecture, it is great for reviewing lectures before exams, for English-as-a-second-language students, those with disabilities and distance and part-time students, as well as regular students who have time-table clashes or who just slept in. We also notice some students putting down their pens and instead listening and participating in class and then later at home or in a computer lab with headphones on and the web browser in the background, writing notes on the lecture in Word as they pause and rewind the recording.
For some lecturers this system is the easiest and simplest way for them to get their lecture content "webified" and it's also great to be able to enable last year's version of a lecture when the lecturer is sick or the lecture has to be cancelled for some reason.
We use the Lectopia system (originally called iLectures) which is an enterprise-class system that enables lecturers to book their lectures at the start of semester and then on the day of each lecture just walk in, turn on the microphone (which triggers the recording) and deliver their lecture as they would normally. 15 minutes or so after they finish their lecture, streaming and podcast versions of the lecture appear on the web in their unit web pages all without any human intervention.
The system automatically captures whatever gets shown on the data projector as a high resolution, high quality XGA stream synchronised to the audio from the lecture theatre sound system so students can see the mouse moving around as the lecturer talks. It also means that no matter whether the lecturer is browsing the web, running a program or just showing powerpoint slides, it all gets recorded at a high enough quality for the users to read the small text better than if they were actually in the lecture theatre.
The system automatically compresses multiple versions for different bandwidths from 14k up to 1Mbps or more in Windows Media, Quicktime, MPEG-4, MP3, iPod audio book and 3GP formats for mobile phones etc in streaming as well as multiple downloadable formats. It also automatically publishes podcast versions to iTunes U.
Duke University in Durham NC uses Lectopia http://www.duke.edu/ddi/projects/capture.html to automatically record their lectures to fill all those iPods they give out to their students. A third of the universities here in Australia and New Zealand also use the system. The University of Western Australia (the original developer of Lectopia) records over 400 lectures per week across over 40 lecture theatres while at least one other university in Australia is planning to install automated Lectopia digitisers in 150 classrooms across their campuses.
We see podcasting/streaming lectures as a very valuable enhancement of existing lectures, something which turns them into a resource available 24/7/365 anywhere in the world. Not a silver bullet to replace lectures, but rather something to expand their usage and capture their value making something that used to last for one hour once a year in one room on campus into something available anytime, anywhere.
-Mart
Martin Hill, Digital Media Specialist
Information Management Services, Curtin University of Technology
Western Australia
web: http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/
The bad students are going to skip all the lectures, zip through all of the podcasts just before an exam, and fail anyway. Without the podcasts, they'll show up for some of the lectures, cheat off of their friends during the assignments, get copies of the podcasts from the same friends, and fail anyway. So it doesn't matter for them either.
The lazy students -- which is 90% of them, but we won't count the ones that fall in either of the preceding categories -- will use the existence of the podcasts as an excuse to not show up to class, will try to sail through them just before exams, and will discover that they can't absorb that much that fast. Those are the ones you're worried about.
I disagree with the other posters who say that there is no issue. I am one of those lazy students. I ended up doing pretty well as an undergrad and then getting an MS from UC Berkeley. In other words, I am one of the people who did well in the absence of those podcasts, and therefore am exactly the sort of person you wouldn't want to do worse if they were available. And my attendance record wasn't exactly stellar to begin with. With the added temptation of postponing a class via a podcast, I suspect I would have royally botched things up. It would have been 100% my own fault, of course, but the whole point of a university is to establish an environment conducive to learning (if you'll forgive the excess syllables.)
For the most part, that means presenting readily available information in a form that students are likely to pick up on, and doing so within a structure that encourages them to do so -- rather than cater exclusively to their much stronger short-term urges to get laid, hang with friends, and catch some Zs. So if some part of the structure makes it less likely for students to learn, even if it's totally those students' fault, then it's not a good idea for the university to set it up that way.
Still, your authentication schemes sound like way overkill. I can think of a couple of possibilities:
1. Have regular homework assignments that use the information in the lectures. Any class for which this makes sense should be doing this anyway, and anyone who is blowing off the homework needn't be catered to.
Still, I can think of a lot of classes I've taken that were more project-focused, and it seems silly to change them around merely because of the existence of podcasts. So...
2. During each lecture, verbally give the code to access the next lecture. Alone, this just provides a little more incentive to keep up with things so you're not wading through a dozen lectures to get the one you really want, but you could also combine it with either of the next two.
3. Make the podcasts available for a limited time. Allow exceptions on a case-by-case basis. I don't think I'd really recommend this one. You might even create a black market for the things.
4. Require students to ask for them individually. Give them out freely whenever they do, even at the last minute. You can automate it, as long as the student knows that the professor can see exactly who they are and when they requested it. Require a written reason (ignored by the automation) for a little added push.
Personally, I'd go for #1 when applicable, #2 alone when not.
Or flip the problem on its head -- what if everyone were required (ok, requested) to listen to the podcasts before the lecture, and the lecture was a lot more interactive? You could pack in more material, the students are incented to view the podcasts so they're not completely lost during the "lecture", and you get a better mix of theory and (guided) practice. I'm not thinking of a Q&A/recitation/discussion session (or whatever your school calls them); I'm more thinking of specific, practical examples of the material covered.
Congratulations on trying to make more resources available to students that want to learn.
My observations:
1) Why make the video available only for the people that attended class? People that had an accident, were sick, had personal/family/work problems would be benefited enormously by having access to such material.
2) Why do you think that those that do not attend class are necessarily "bad" students? To me a bad student is one that can't or doesn't want to learn. Learning can be achieved by different means.
3) If you value attendance so much, why aren't you taking steps in making attendance something students will want to do instead of trying to glue their asses to the chairs?
One of the worst professors i had (and that was a long long time ago), was one that would project (using an overhead projector) pages of barkakati and hyde's "microsoft macro assembler bible" and read them out loud. That was the whole class. Needless to say i'd read the book on my own and went to class only when i had questions nobody else could answer. Does that make me a "bad" student? Most of the "good" students did not learn x86 assembly. I did.
You're working on a system to benefit the students. Your main target group is the group that actually attends most of their classes. If you provide a stripped down version to minimize the benefit to the group that is generally truant, you are minimizing the benefit to the students that attend.
You state that you are worried about whether or not your endeavour will encourage students to become more truant and use the tools to study the night before the exam. Students who are apt to do this will do so regardless of whether or not your project ever comes to fruition. They'll also learn the hard way that their marks suffer from this, and having 200hours worth of video files to sift through in the 12-24 hours of cram time before a final will likely hurt them more than help them. The students who attended class might want to use the full footage to find something they're not too solid on. So posting the full sound/video package will likely not benefit the non-attenders, but could heavily benefit the attenders.
As I mentioned though, non-attenders are likely to skip anyway, though you are right, their truancy might increase slightly... I highly doubt the trend would last more than a semester or two, as people will learn the hard way that attending class does, in fact, help your marks... unless of course you can't understand the prof at all. I had one who was completely unintelligible, and used only u,v and x as variables... the problem was his u's, v's and x's all looked exactly identical in his chicken-scratched blackboard-scrawls. I didn't much attend that class, and an audio/video stream likely wouldn't have helped anyway ;-)
My suggestion: Go with the full meal deal and make it as accessible as possible. Allow it outside even (provided you guys have the bandwidth.) Prospective students will use it to see what the profs are like, which may be a good or bad thing for you? As well, non-students will be able to use it to brush up on skills. As to the poster previously who said that this last might hurt the university, I'd like to know how? These non-students would either be in a position where they will never be able to go to a university (in which case the university has lost nothing) or they would be in a position to go to a university (in which case they'll need to actually enrol in order to get a diploma) and they'll have gained a certain amount of respect for a university that makes it's courses freely available. As well, in both cases, these people would likely refer others to this university if they're learning from these audio/video files.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Allow all to benefit from the lectures (whether students of the university or not).
And post them immediately after the lecture takes place.. bad students are going to be bad students, and it's not your job in college to coddle them to get them to do their work. They have to take some responsibility for themselves. If you post them late (ie. a class,week,etc. behind) then you're only inconveniencing "good" students who happen to miss a class due to illness/etc. (ie. if you miss a class, the next class doesn't make a lot of sense if it built on the previous one.. )
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Why is attendance even an issue? University education is adult education: please treat your students as such.
The ability for independent study is the one major skill universities should cultivate, and for that students should have some responsability over their own educational process. Isn't it better to encourage and enable them?
It is not the business of a university to make students attend classes. It's business is to educate, and attendance only has merit as one among many means towards that agenda. I'd guess this obsession with attendance and pedagogic hand-holding originally came from elementary or high-school system, where the goal of the school has more to do with the loco parentis than with any real education. But it really has no place in adult education.
A "bad student" is not going to start cramming the whole semester before the final just because the podcasts are there... they have been doing this since academic tests have existed, and if anything, video is evidently less efficient (time-wise) than the old all-nighter-with-the-books.
Of course, some teachers try to 'solve' this problem with artificial methods: keeping the chapters that matter secret outside the lecture, changing focus and topics between periods to prevent note-trading, giving attendance weight in the academic grade, or other ways to make being able to pass a reward for being in class.
This is just putting obstacles in the learning process of the students for the sake of solving a non-issue, taking away resources (clear notes and syllabus, lecture material, etc) for an agenda that is not their education.
It solves nothing and makes the availability of these resources at least partially moot. Your "good" students are penalized by going through a hassle for this and losing the flexibility this could have provided. Your "bad" students get to sleep in your class (or disturb it in boredom).
Both groups are going to study in their own ways anyway, and both should be evaluated identically based on their comprehension of the material and excercise of any applicable skills.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
It's a friekin' university, not high school. These are adults we're talking about. If the class is so worthless and the instructors so ineffectual that students can get what they need from a podcast, then you really need to take a hard look at the quality or your education. Try improving the quality of the class. Make it interesting. Encourage participation and maybe less people will be tempted to just download the podcast.
Look at it this way, if enough students are "truant," those oversized lecture halls might shrink down a bit so that real learning can take place. I can only see this as a good thing. Let the lazy people stay home. Nobody wants them there anyway.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
just make it available and don't worry about it being abused. In college it's your own fault if you fail because of procrastination.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
Honestly, who cares if they show up? Look, this isn't High School. You're not babysitting anyone. They've paid their tuition. If they try to take the easy way out and it flunks them, that's THEIR problem, not yours. Frankly, it'd be a good lesson on how the world works. I think the podcasting would be a wonderful means for those that have to miss a class here and there. It'd be a wonderful material for review. Anyone who uses it in lieu of class though is asking for trouble.
To get the previous lecture podcast, you must attend the next class.
Missed lectures will be provided one week before exam. Password distributed in class.
Also, consider visual aids will not make it into typical podcast (although possible, dependant on ipod or media player)
I'm studying business and IT at QUT (Brisbane, Australia). The staff there have the technology to "podcast" lectures if they wish. It's done on a unit by unit basis. Mostly my IT lectures do it. It doesn't have the drastic impact that some might think. Students who don't attend lectures won't change their behaviour as a result of podcasting. The lectures slides are released also as the course progresses so this is just "another medium" for communicating the information. Yes, some students cram before the exam but that is their call. University is not primary school - it's for big kids!
This is really a discussion you need to have with the School officials, and they need to decide what their teaching goals are....
Certain types of classes are just fine as resatations, which would be fine if they were posted immeadiately, while others really require that the students engage in classroom dialog to cover the various nuaunces of certain subjects.
What ever system you build should allow the professor to decide how the content could be used.
Weather or not the students attend class can be covered by the professors tracking "classroom participation". No pod-cast system is going to releive the students of that responsibilty, and you can address that in whatever training/access documentation you come up with for the system. This of course needs to be done in conjunction with the professors giving the students that reminder as well durring their first classes....
As for restricting access; The faculty could easily enter their attendance sheets for the class if they keep those records, and students clould be allowed access based on that, assuming you hae a centralized account system to tie this to.... (This doesn't address students "sharing" the dowloaded file with others, for that you'd be looking at some sort of DRM, even that won't stop determined students, but there is a certain ammount of assumed academic honesty.... Violations of that can be left to your school disiplanary board.)
Let the professor decide who gets to view the podcasts. Really it is their class and not yours. If the university forces you to decide, I think it is time to take it up to the unversity that you are not teaching class and really should not be the one who decides. Really some professors understand why people don't want to class like they woke up late or some other stuff. Each professors have their own way of teaching and having you decide how they should teach will not go well with them at all. In fact the union might get upset that you are setting their members policies. Yes professors have unions, I should know my dad belongs to one. I don't see why the university is asking you to set the policy who gets to see the podcasts, this is not a technicially problem that you should be solving, this should be up to each professor and/or the university. Even if you have a technicially solution, it should not matter to you who sees it because you should have no control over that, the university is the one who gets control on that. You can recomend technicial solutions that the university/professors can use to prevent the non-going to class student from seeing the podcast but you should not be the one who decides to put it in place. This is a policy decision which does not belong in the ITs hands. If the university actually put it in ITs hands, I hope the professor union gets upsets and actually gets the university to change because it is just wrong.
I record lectures daily and podcast them for my classmates. It has helped a number of my classmates pass who otherwise would not pass. The way I see it is I really don't care if people skip class and only listen to podcasts. If I'm there I get a first exposure to material and if I go back and listen I get a second exposure to fill in the details. Works great for me, and I know listening with a pause button has helped a lot of people out as well.
My $0.02.
This is college. If a student wishes to not attend class that is THEIR choice. If they can successfully cram before the exam then this is the professors problem.
Honestly, you should want students who miss class (there are legitimate reasons for this) the be able to get as much as possible if they are willing to put in the time.
Why do you feel that there is value to the university in students being in the classroom? If you could successfully provide learning media which was not geographicly restricted, that seems like a good thing.
Perhaps I could put this another way. The point of college is to learn, right? So if the student passes the exam, that should mean that they have learned enough about that subject. How they learn it is not as important. If the method really is important to you, force some freshman classes to be taken which do not have alternative resources (such as the pod cast).
-Tim Louden
I teach Econometrics part time at a University here in London, and if a student stays "at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam" they ain't gonna pass no way no how unless they've been through the material before.
It was the same when I did my undergrad (Math / Comp Sci) back in the late 70's.
I hardly think the ability to pass an exam without attending class is indicative of a bad student. Maybe the student is smart and the class unchallenging?
OP must be talking about some elective; not any course with high demands for learning.
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All the students I've seen that slack for the entire semester on the idea that they'll just cram it all in at the end of the semester tend to continue their habits. They'll put in an hour of flipping through the textbook, convince themselves that they know the material, and then go into the exam room and screw up royally. No loss.
Maybe put a price tag on 'em? Or throttle how much you can download to one every four hours or something? I'd tend towards the throttle approach if you think you /must/ control it, I know I wouldn't buy any lectures that I already paid for in tuition.
I'm paying them a fuck ton of money to teach me, not to take roll.
Having to show up to class is detention, not learning.
There's plenty of things to learn in college, and one is you need to manage your own time and affairs. That means going to class because you know it's what you need to do to learn what you need to know, not because you'll be arbitrarily punished if you don't go.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I can't help but think of the scene in Real Genius where as the semester goes on the students in the main character's classes are slowly replaced by tape recorders, until the whole class is a bunch of recorders recording a lecture from a giant tape player in the place of the professor.
See the discussion in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig why you should not fret about good students/bad students. Don't have a copy with me but roughly it's discussed in part 3.
Distance Education courses are increasingly effective and use technologies like podcasting with impressive effects. Why tie oneself to the drawbacks of traditional classrooms when they are unnecessary? If you find that your students are skipping the lectures — perhaps you should re-evaluate the content and format of the lectures? If your students don't feel compelled to attend, perhaps it's the arrow and not the indian?
Hi,
Congratulations on podcasting your lectures. I was involved in setting up exactly this sort of thing at a large Australian University. The good news is that you have nothing to fear; Our lecturers had similar concerns, but after we implimented our system we found no visibile drop off in attendance. And a lot of students downloaded the lectures (in fact, most downloaded them within 48 hours of the actual lecture). In some subjects, particularly law, the hit rate was over 50% of the enrolment. But it turns out most students were using the lecutures for revision. Apparently this was an important factor for students from a non english speaking background.
The system you want is lectopia. http://ilectures.uwa.edu.au/ (and no, I don't work for them)
1/4 the class comes to lectures only .25 sample the live and recorded information on their own terms
1/4 of the class is barred from attending live lectures but gets unlimited access to the podcasts
1/4 go to class and also have access to down load a podcast until the next lecture
the remaining
just to make it amusing, the course material should be about educational psychology.
Contact iTunes University.
/
http://www.apple.com/education/solutions/itunes_u
I tend to agree that if you're able to get students interested in the material and learning, then the means (classroom vs. headphones) is of less importance. Regarding government funding requirements that require attendance. What purpose does that serve? The government would get more bang for it's University subsidizing buck if it instead required all funded universities to publish their faculty's lectures as audio podcasts with no access restrictions. More access to this information would be helpful to everyone involved. And don't give me that crap about people not paying for a university education b/c they can hear the podcast for free. For the vast majority of people it is all about the piece of paper. Though if we could all benefit from the lectures then so much the better.
Upon returning to school to get my graduate degree, I had to take some undergrad prerequisites, including one 500+ student class where the teacher recorded her lectures, which were available immediately after class concluded on the university's podcasting site. The site was password protected (university authentication), but I don't know if it was linked up to any kind of scheduling database. You only had to know the section you were taking to download the file, and there were no extra limitations.
This was a happy solution for myself, as I missed a couple of days for being sick - being able to download and listen to the lecture helped immensely. I know others who downloaded the lectures as part of a review process in preparation for examinations.
However, like any class resource, it is up to the student to use or abuse at their will. This same class offered extra credit study sessions, dual lectures (doesn't matter which one you attend as long as you attend one of them), extra credit extra curricular class workshops, a half dozen teachers assistants who were in the degree program (and ran many of these extra credit programs), and many, many other resources to allow the student to better themselves. All options were freely offered, and I don't know of any that were underutilized. There are always going to be students who are not going to push themselves to be the best they can be. It is not up to the professor to push them - all they can do is provide opportunity, and encouragement. To do anything else invites trouble, either personal or professional. With a resource like podcasting, best thing to do is to provide it as a resource, and let the students determine how to best utilize it.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Since copying cannot be controlled anyways, the solution to your third solution is to choose SSO university password.
Hey, anything that keeps the bad students out of class and freeing the teacher up for the good students can only be a good thing. *efg*
I was originally going to say, "Who the fuck cares if they come to class? If they are learning and paying for said learning, the professor should not care at all whether they come to class." However, I have a more productive solution: Don't answer emails and don't meet with students who don't come to class. Only students who come on a regular basis should be able to get extra information from the professor. This is under the assumption that students who don't come to class could have had their questions answered during class, avoiding their need to meet with the prof outside of class. This rewards students who go to class while allowing all the benefit of podcast lectures.
I am a student and UC Berkeley and many lecture classes (Chem 1A for example) are posted online for download after the lecture, and streamed live during.
Its the student's responsibility to learn, just as it is the professor's responsibility to teach. Those that skip class will do so whether there are podcasts available or not. Learning is an interactive process and any students who think they can learn just as much from watching podcasts are bound to fail anyway.
On a side note, something tells me this poster is an employee of a private university....
Amazing that this story has gone from a request for help implementing a procedure for posting and/or securing podcasts to a discussion on the ethics of student attendance....
The real issue, is that if a student can learn all they need to know from a Podcast of the lecture then your instructors either aren't teaching well or aren't challenging them enough. The effective part of learning should come from the unique way a lecturer engages their pupils, and not from them reading from a powerpoint slide. You have a teaching issue, not a technological issue.
Protect the lectures with a password. Have the students email you if they would like access to the files. Reply to email, distribute password accordingly.
For me, my worry would be that non-students get the podcast. That is, people who have not spent thousands of bucks in tuition getting ahold of the precious information imparted by the learned souls at the front of the class. Which points to my general belief on the subject, which is if the person paid tuition for the class, he paid to have access to the podcast (assuming there is one), whether or not he sits in class at the appointed time.
And the whole question reminds me of a movie I once saw but can't remember the name of. Four shots of the same classroom, broken up through the movie. It starts with standard view of the classroom, with students seated, taking notes and looking bored while the professor lectures. Second view, same, with a sprinkling of tape recorders set up on desks. Third view, same, but with tape recorders outnumbering the students. Fourth view, All desks have tape recorders on them. Nobody in the seats. And at the lecturn? A big reel-to-reel, spinning and playing the professor's notes, as if to directly place the notes into the students' tape recorders. Like a podcast. B) It made and makes me laugh, but in all seriousness, if the class is worth the student's time, that student goes.
To make any scheme work, attendance will have to be taken. Preferably in an electronic form, as any other way will take up a lot of TA time, and while TA time is cheap, the professors have better uses for it. And any scheme like that will be unpopular, seen as draconian and stupid. And until DRM comes, there will be little to stop Mary the Model Student from sending the podcast to Sam the Slacker who skips class. And if Sam skips class, might he not avoid listening to the podcast, too?
The profs know the people who skip all the time. They know the Sams of this world. They're the ones dropping out after the first test when they've failed it. They're the ones with incomplete and late assignments. I don't see podcasts changing that.
I have a full time job in IT, three children and a wife and try to keep up with an introductory computer science class at a university in my city. I have bought most books, but I already have access to four excellent books on Java, so I didn't bother to buy the prescribed curriculum book, which I'm sure is great, but probably mostly redundant in my case. Not OK. The teacher decides to give us an extra mandatory exercise from the curriculum book, just siting the exercise number, not what the question was. Now I have to go out of my way to get hold of the question. This is so inefficient. I'm getting to old for this kind of crap teaching. So my advise to the podcaster is the following: do live streaming AND podcast just after the lecture.
But many, including many potential employers, view school as a screening tool. They want to see if you can go through the process of getting the degree, and passing tests is only a small part of that process. Consistently arriving for 8 A.M. classes in subjects for which you have no interest, doing lame projects that impart no knowledge, working and playing well with others, and all the rest of what makes school frustrating can be seen as screening tools to see who can and who cannot put forth the consistent effort that would identify a potential employee. The person who skips every class but aces all the tests may not be the one they want, because she would not have demonstrated the ability to work around someone else's schedule, follow through on mundane assignments, or work as part of a team towards a common goal.
I'd rather view the nature of education as the former option, because I've always wanted a "classical" education. I hate viewing college as just a glorified trade school used to prepare you for a life of cubicles and casual Fridays. But I hail from the upper working class/lower middle class (I could never figure it out) so perhaps my ideals are a bit, well, idealized. I wanted "an education," not just a piece of paper that will get me a job. I know a person with a Master's degree (in nursing) who did not know who Stalin or Freud were when I asked her. Really. But I do realize that our education system (speaking of the United States, granted) must serve the needs of the society we have, which largely revolves around getting and keeping a job, not around a familiarity with Plutarch and Nabokov. That damned "reality" is always putting a kink in my aspirations.
Or daycare. The professor is there to help, but a student in university is ultimately responsible for his own education.
The only issue here should be copyright - if the prof is okay with his lecture being recorded, then students should be free to learn by watching the podcasts and using (or not using) whatever other resources they can find.
Hey,
Video lectures let you learn mroe quickly. In my last CS class, video lectures were available and I never went to class. Instead I watched the lectures at home @ 2x speed. What would have taken 50 minutes for the lecture, and 20 minutes for transportation to class, I now fit into 25 minutes. The parts I don't understand, I can rewatch.
Once you get to college you're supposed to be motivated by your own means. Students who skip classes can do what they damn well please. No matter what you do motivated students will show up to lecture and lazy students will circumvent the system.
Seriously all this garbage about turning off wifi networks in class and restricting students access to online resources is rediculous. If they can learn that way good for them if not they're paying a lot of money to not attend class. The lectures that were the most beneficial to me in college were the ones I had to listen to closely to understand and the ones where I needed to ask questions and talk to people about afterwords.
The students that dont attend lecture will either get a worse grade. Or they'll learn by looking at the online resources. What's the problem?
Stanford has a wealth of class- and non-class material online. See the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series the student led iinnovate interview series.
This is 2006, man. Information has wanted to be free for over 22 years now. Consider the benefit to your students - even the bad ones - of being able to get the podcast. Consider the total benefit to humanity if even non-students can download and watch/listen to these podcasts.
The internet has made information duplication almost free, almost effortless. The internet has taught us that it's better, in most things, to open up. Attempting to hoard these podcasts, for whatever reason, will earn you no kudos. On the other hand if you release them to the world, you will gain respect, prestige, more students, better students, better lecturers, more sex and more money.
Well, clearly you haven't taken many English courses.
A lot of courses have lecture notes which are received at the beginning of the course or before each class. Some courses have class time purely for clarification and discussion, and students are expected to have read over the material before class. Reading notes or a textbook is hardly "cheating". Of course, I missed about 5 days in 5 years and was on the Dean's List each year, but I'm a little bit obsessive-compulsive.
...and it was the most worthless, pathetic course ever. Ridiculous paperwork from a prof who hadn't spent ten minutes in the real world.
"No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given." -- Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"
This doesn't deal with distinguishing between good and bad students, but it keeps a number of students honest: unannounced pop-quizes.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Built by the University of Western Australia and also used by Curtin University, there are completely automagic systems in use.
From Curtin's site:
A lecturer walks into their next lecture, turns the microphone on and delivers a lecture. An hour or so later, without any human intervention, an appropriately titled link automatically appears on the web page of that unit adding the just finished lecture to the list of all the lecture recordings for that unit.
Links
http://www.lectopia-service.uwa.edu.au/about
http://www.lectopia.uwa.edu.au/history.lasso
http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/information/
|>>?
To amplify on the parent: So far, every reason against podcasts looks pretty lame. Why is having podcasts available even a problem? Let's look at the arguments in favor of restriction.
The Universities will lose money? I don't think so. Educational institutions receive a lot more govt money than artists do. I just can't see a professor starting off the first lecture with a speech about how his or her children will starve if the students don't attend class. Would be laughed out of the classroom, or serenaded by the world's tiniest violins, or smacked with $200 used textbooks and luxury car moved to a prominent display on the library's roof.
And, students won't have to attend class? Who cares about that? The only thing that matters is whether they learned the material. How they learn is up to them. There will always be some who will want to attend lectures. Such dogma! Students who attend class are "good" and those who don't are "bad". And "bad" students must be stopped from succeeding!
The podcasts will somehow enable the "bad" students to pass the tests without learning the material? They can download all the lectures the night before the exam and cram? No, don't see that one either. There are all kinds of variables being ignored in such a suggestion. Perhaps the material is trivially easy to learn. If so, and podcasts show us that, then we should be grateful to podcasts and eager to try them out on other subjects to see what we might learn. Maybe some students already know the material but are required to take the class anyway. Maybe the class is poorly taught or tested, with very sketchy coverage of the material so that even thought the subject is too much to pick up in a night of cramming, the material on the test is so watered down that minimal preparation with memorized responses to rote questions is enough to pass. Maybe some students cheat. All those are things that could be misinterpreted, perhaps deliberately. Podcasts wouldn't cause any of that. But maybe someone with a hidden agenda could try to blame those problems on podcasts. A poor instructor is rather likely to come down hard and unfairly against anything new. Helps shift attention away from the poor performance of the professor. The podcast is just another mean of learning, like books, or lectures, or study groups. Back in the day, many math teachers tried to ban calculators.
Some questions back at theslashdot: Do you realize you're asking for DRM? And, do you realize DRM does not work? That the concept of DRM is flawed? You skipped right over the why and whethers, and went straight to the hows. The questions on the technical details suggest you haven't even thought that there may not be a way to do it. Consider, then go back to the most important question: Even if there was a way, why would you want to do this? Why stop anyone from obtaining podcasts? WHY?? Whoever is demanding that you figure a way to restrict access doesn't properly appreciate the problems. It can't be done. It shouldn't be done.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
well first of all your job is NOT to supervise the learning process at the school. So if the professor doesn't care if the students attend then you shouldn't either. A lot of profs have an attendance policy and those who don't know exactly why. Sorry to break it to you but you are just technical help and NOT a policy maker.
but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam
Just switch all the lectures around randomly shortly before exam time. Obviously you'd have to arrange the lectures so you couldn't tell the title/course from just from the video, but it seems worth the effort to me.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Lecture videos are avaliable for a number of courses at ocw.mit.edu. Another poster commented that OCW content was very poor. This may have been true early on, but it's clearly getting better.
UC Berkeley now has video/audio lecutres avaliable for a number of their courses at webcast.berkeley.edu
Sometimes you can find lectures from MIT and Berkeley at video.google.com. For example, Physics for future Presidents
Required reading for internet skeptics
heck! post them so everyone can learn from them. why keep all that info to yourself
Never having commented on a Slashdot article, I was so frustrated by the attitude of this article I had to go and create an account!
This is just the sort of typical absence of logic which is killing society in general. It stinks of "Let's protect the people because they can't protect themselves". The guy is not so concerned about restricting the University's intellectual property from people who haven't paid for the service as he is about restricting it from people who haven't attended the lecture! Madness. If I can learn from a podcast, what can possibly be wrong with that? How is that different to a student borrowing a book from the library and learning? Are you going to restrict the library books only to those students who swiped their card at the lecture?
YOUR assessments place me as having passed or failed, and if attendance at a lecture is a factor in that assessment, rather than carefully crafted exams and assignments, then that is very sad indeed. By restricting the course content to students who attend lectures, you're saying you want those who don't attend to fail, and therefore attendance is an assessable part of a university student's grade. It basically says that you have no confidence in your assessments to gauge the students' proper marks, so you'd rather go with the assumption that those students who turn up to class are the ones who should get a better mark. It is illogical, and it sucks.
Make no mistake, I have nothing against restricting the content to those who have paid for it, but that includes all students of the university, regardless of attendance record.
Yes, this could enable students to skip classes. However, quite an amount of additional information & interaction is give in the class. The electronic media are an addition to the class, not a replacement.
We also have newgroups for asynchronous discussion, which is used heavily. Especially a week before the final exams our groups are flooded with questions. Answering them can be tedious, but you can let the students help each other and only jump in when a student answer is incorrect or nobody knows for sure. Believe me: students cherish such a service
So how do students learn? 90% still visit the classes, but are better prepared because they can focus on the prof and can annotate their slides when required. Students no longer waste time on copying the slides. Some students use the audio lectures for preparation and wrap-up. [1] The audio lectures of course are different to the classes - they should last 15 minutes max. In the weeks before exams, students learn with the slide sets and listen to specific audio lectures again to fill the gaps.
So to sum it up:
Of course, this requires a certain degree of self-organization on the side of the students... life is no pony farm.
HTH
[1] downloads are a good thing: they can be transferred to a MP3 player or burned on a CD. Students listen to the audio lectures when jogging, on public transit, and as "audio books" in the car. Honestly.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
Trouble is: by the time they have figured out that they ought to have come to lecture, it's too late.
And it's not just about physical presence in the lecture hall, it's also about the pacing.
That's basically what this all boils down to.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...not determine attendance policy for the professor in the class. If a professor cares about attendance, they will connect it to a portion of the student's letter grade; if they don't, they won't.
Additionally, should you decide to create a system with built-in attendance-related restrictions, you will automatically become the target of everybody's dissatisfaction: professors who see attendance drop will blame you for not implementing strong enough measures, while professors who dislike the restrictions (or dislike having to deal with them) will accuse you of making their teaching more difficult. Either way, you can't win.
I'd recommend that you focus on what is squarely within your area of competency: making sure that the audio is clear, that the podcasts are available in formats that any student can easily access, and that they're available promptly and reliably. Should any faculty member bring up the attendance issue, you can simply point out to them that it would be inappropriate for IT to dictate attendance policy to the faculty by unilaterally setting up podcast restrictions.
As someone who actually has to give lectures (in a UK university) I guess that podcasting would mean that I could just do a course of lectures once, and then just give out the url of the podcast to my students for the rest of my career. No point in repeating the lectures every year to increasingly empty lecture theatres if (as seems to be the case from most of the posts here) students would be just as happy - or even rather - have a podcast.
But I actually don't think that is the case. In my experience most students come to most lectures most of the time. I generally see about 2/3 of the students enroled on my course in the lecture theatre for each session (usually twice a week). Compare this with the extensive reading lists I distribute for the course: not even a fraction of students look at even a fraction of the library materials I suggest. I think that podcasts of lectures would probably be the same.
It isn't so long ago that I was a student myself, and I think there is an important thing that has been missed here: the 'lecture as event'. As a student it is much easier to motivate yourself to attend a lecture which is timetabled at a particular time in a particular room. It becomes part of your weekly routine. When students are left to their own devices to do it in their own time one of two things happens:
1. They can always find something better to do, and never quite get around to watching that podcast/reading that book.
or
2. They watch them all the night before the exam.
Neither of these lead to good learning outcomes. And I think it is just human nature - we are much better at turning up when we're told to turn up than we are at doing things in our own time.
It's not the responsibility of the lecturer, university, or anyone else to pass the exam, but the responsibility rests on the shoulders of the students. If a student wants to stay in bed all day listening to podcasts, but works hard enough to pass the exam, what's wrong with that? Let the students take responsibility for their own actions and provide them with as much material as you can.
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
Tegrity[tegrity.com] has been doing this for a few years, and a lot of unis are using them.
They have some pretty cool stuff - students can create bookmarks while scribbling their notes, then later they can jump to the bookmark while reviewing the podcast.
Also, IANAS (I am not a statistician) but I can say that a high percentage of the professors I've had, and the professors my friends have had, don't ask questions, or encourage any interaction from the audience at all. In fact, many I have frown upon it.
Whether people interact in lecture is not the main point (although there is still plenty of interactivity even if you just sit there and look bored). You presumably interact in the smaller groups that accompany most lectures, and in order to contribute to those, you need to be prepared.
More importantly, courses are paced so that an average student can keep up with the workload if he participates steadily; if students start skipping classes with the intent of catching up later on video, they won't be prepared for the groups, and they won't have enough time towads the end of the semester to do the reading and homework anymore before the exam.
Now, you may say that really smart students can skip the lecture and then catch up in a short amount of time at the end. Well, if they can do that, they don't need the lectures on video either. Students who would actually view the lectures on video might as well come to class.
Let me ask the reverse question: why would you not come to lectures at the scheduled times? You're in school, you're paying good money for it, the curriculum is designed to enable you to take the courses without conflicts, and the courses are designed for steady, regular attendence. What earthly reason would there be to skip classes except in cases of dire emergency?
"If a kid chooses to not attend class but still listens to all the professors lectures, why prevent him from doing so?"
I thought we were talking about college students? When did they all become children incapable of decisions?
I am 29. So far, one of the most basic things I have learned about "school" is that ONE size does NOT fit all. For example, there are 3 types of learners: audial, visual, and kinesthetic. Some people learn better in the morning, some at night. Some people are great at impromptu discussion, some need to think and prepare beforehand. Some are nervous in large social situations, some feel claustrophobic in small groups. People are different and unique in their methods for living, learning, and socializing (can I get a hallelujiah?). When I hear the zealotry of any school system defending a myopic view of learning, I am only disapointed at their lack of flexibility, creativity, and innovation.
But is this a successful and complete education? On one level I understand what you're saying, and I understand the primary reason for going to university is to get a piece of paper which says you have the qualification. I take your point that 'learning the material' is probably the most important measure but heck, it's troublesome. Clearly for you "passing exams" is a significant part of your definition of "being educated". Sounds like your college needs to carefully examine its teaching methods, it could be in danger of turning out a bunch of trained monkeys. It may have an excellent system, and set really well designed tasks for you, so maybe all is fine, but declaring that its possible for a student to succeed in their university education without any contact with their fellow students or the teaching staff raises some fundamental issues. Mind you I think there is discussion going on about this at the moment, with more and more courses being put online. Maybe a university is just about accreditation? Though your comment about lecturers having horrible foreign accents suggests that a little bit of cultural exposure might also be useful for you.
I'm in Australia (RIP Steve Irwin).
So far, almost all lecturers in my current course post their slides online before the lecture (out-roar of fury by the students when they aren't available). The past 1.5 years (I'm in 3rd year), they have been posting recordings.
Attendance has hardly changed...
The lectures almost ubiquitously have 80-90% attendance. The only exception is the one unit that does not release the notes in advance (outright trying to blackmail the students into attendance), ironically this is the one unit that would gain the most by students being able to annotate the notes.
The people not attending either live in their text-book or are on a practical session.
In comparison, my previous courses had "varying" attendance.. Maths (Calculus) ~90% attendance and ~50% pass rate, Physics ~70-80% attendance and ~80% pass rate (awesome textbook and questionable lecturers) and Chem ~10% attendance and 90% pass rate (awesome notes and self-paced, lectures were advertised as "optional").
By the way.. I'm doing medicine now.. so it's not like the material is any easier or "slow paced.."
-Crickey
Check out http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/index.php.
A lot of our classes are webcast for anyone and everyone who wants to view the lectures. Apparently, they are experimenting with podcasts too. Webcasts are a great resource for people who go to class and want to catch up. They're also a great resource for people who can't make the class but want to keep up.
The truancy issue is between the professor and the student. Most of our professors don't do anything to encourage attendance. They offer their lectures; you can take them or not. You're also free to learn by any other means available to you. Do the graded coursework, pass the exams, and you'll get the grade you deserve. Most students who go to lecture tend to do better.
If you really want to attack the truancy issue, one thing professors will do from time to time is give pop quizzes. If they're worth enough of the grade, students actually get nervous about missing the classes. Another option (you can watch the CS 61C lectures to see it in action) is that professors use "clickers" in class. So, instead of being penalized for ditching, you get bonus points for participating in lecture; you can't participate if you aren't there.
Control freak professors don't care if you learn or not, as long as you sit still, obey, and shut up while they are speaking. The control freak professor wants to control not only how you learn, but what you learn. The control freak professor considers you as something to have information programmed into, for whatever agenda. If you aren't in class then you cannot be taught to obey. If you aren't in class you cannot be late and punished. If you aren't in class you cannot be graded by how you look, by gender, race, etc. If you aren't in class you cannot be told how to learn.
I'm not sure it's the responsibility of the technical administrator of the podcasts to ensure student attendance.
... let the educators do the educating and the techies do the computer-voodoo.
At Macquarie University in Sydney we have an audio podcast system. Access to these is via logging in to the WEBCT teaching software which links you to the files relevant to the classes you are enrolled in. This system is very good - lectures are posted to the web within an hour of their finish time. The university understands that its not just the lazy students that miss classes - its the studious ones that stay up all night working their heart out on a project (not because they left it to the last minute!), or those who work a part time job that conflicts.
It is up to lecturers to make their classes worthwhile, interesting, etc to ensure student attendance. At Mac some lecturers make movies, graphs, and other media available only to those that attend the lectures. Small incentives are better than a heavy handed approach.
In any case
Currently those who miss the class can get notes from other students anyway. Those students who do not attend lectures are either brilliant and can research the material in their own way, or they are going to fail. Any student who believes they can rely on notes from someone else will most likely fail. Same deal for video lectures.
I'd love to have my old Engineering lectures in a video format on my server at home. Sometimes I think it would be faster/better to lookup a video lecture about X because I can locate that info faster than by picking up a book. Some of those lectures I had to attend were so packed full of information it was sometimes difficult to absorb everything in a short timefrome. While I know that a certain theory exists, I don't always know what it was called, however, I *can* recall the lecture and who gave it.
My suggestion is to edit out 5 minutes of the lecture and this 5 minutes must contain an exam hint or extra piece of info. Those who miss the lecture will really miss out. Thats a definate reason to attend. Don't tell any of them what is going to be left out... Sure they can get the info from their friends, but 5 minutes from a 50 minute lecture is 10% and if that 10% contains exam hints, then that 10% is really worth a lot more.
How many of their friends are gonna sit down and work out exactly which 5 minutes has been edited out, especially if you put jumps and stutters into the video. Walk from one side of the hall and back again all the time while looking into space, act like you are in deep thought. These are good points to edit in and out.
You could always take role call several times a semester and fail those who attend less than 60% of classes. Same sort of maths involved in this as with the rejection of mass produced items... statistics... second year, subject = KME271, oh, damn, I wish I had that video lecture
Does it go on forever?
Some big universities in Australia have been podcasting their courses for years using the ilecture system developed by University of Western Australia (http://ilectures.uwa.edu.au/). It uses all apple technologies.
Start again: What is the University charging for? Is it charging for chair space or is it charging for having accumulated resources in one convenient place so the payees can "better" themselves? As long as the University can certify that the student learned the material and can competently demonstrate the skills, it should not matter whether the student gets the lecture material at home, in class, in the Library, or off the Net from a small coffee shop in Europe...
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
is still a way fucking retarded word. Not everyone has an iPod.
Just like they do at Berkeley. I've listened to a couple of the History 5 lectures, and even without the slides they're quite enjoyable. I suppose it might be a bit harder for math classes though.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Here's a great collection of links to lecture webcasts from Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and many more: http://internet-tv-search-engine-swicki.eurekster. com/online+lectures/
How can I start a new threat where we can collect links to University podcasts and lecture webcasts? (Or somebody else please do it - I'm new here.)
Why should the students have to attend class?
At University it was up to me if I wanted to show up or not.
For a non-student who has a long commute and an interest in several subjects, are there any teachers who have the "Information wants to be free" attitude and make podcasts of their own lectures available to non-students?
I know, this means the professor is giving away an intellectual property for free, but some people are ok with the idea.
This only works if you have time before or after a lecture to network, and if you're the social type who easily connects with others. At MIT I typically had 5 minutes to get from one lecture to another at the far end of a large and crowded campus. And I have a terrible time socializing, even with other nerds. If a lecture was just a rehash of a textbook, I skipped it. But I still attended plenty of lectures run by interesting and charismatic professors. I'd have loved to have those lectures on video, especially those of professors no longer with us. (Need I remind everyone of the Feynman physics series?)
Yes. http://internet-tv-search-engine-swicki.eurekster. com/online+lectures/
I'd like to open a new threat where we could collect some more links to Uni podcasts/webcasts but I don't know how. (There must be many more out there from Europe, Asia, South America...) Could someone please open a "University Podcast/Webcast Collection" threat? Thanks!
I am a grad student at DePaul U. in Chicago. I also work a full-time day job. Online classes make my graduate education possible, and for the naysayers, the course material is identical to the in-class. The online courses are actually webcasts of 'live' classes posted the day after the class occurs, and exams must be taken on-site or proctored. .wmv files and a link to one of the free tools (e.g., iSquint) that will convert .wmv to Quicktime. Podcasts of the audio are awesome - watching webcasts is pretty uselss, since the stream is usually so low-res that it is impossible to read the blackboard/whiteboard. Speaking of which, do not waste resources on a fancy 'collaboration tool' wherein the class video is embedded in a Java applet that also shows the whiteboard contents in detail - nice idea, but usually the video quality still sucks, and students are then stuck watching via a browser. Plus, poor handwriting on a low-res whiteboard equals illegible scribbles on half the screen. I prefer printing the class notes and following along a podcast - works great, and I can take notes on my hardcopy. This works only if your professor is organized enough to have good lecture notes - which s/he should, especally at the graduate level.
... mostly...)
Online classes are great for motivated students but terrible for non-motivated students. When it comes to class interaction, especially for technical classes, I prefer online classes with a good discussion board / wiki. Offer the classes as soon as they are done, and don't encumber them (I have to jump through hoops to get my classes into a format I can watch, since DePaul only supports IE on a PC for watching classes). If you have the server space, put them out there in Quicktime and Windows Media format, or if you must, post unencumbered
Copyright should be a nonissue, since unless you are registered, you can't get the degree, which is the whole point of the class. If someone wants to download your content to see what the classes are all about, let them - free promotion.
Also, make texts available online. College bookstores are, in my experience, a complete ripoff, and don't even tell me how the huge margins support student programs - that's crap. At DePaul, the student bookstore is a Barnes & Noble, and they gouge the hell out of us to the point where most of the faculty tell students point-blank, "don't buy your books at the bookstore, go to (insert recommended online discount textbook supplier)."
For liberal arts classes, however, all bets are off - just post the notes and forget the lectures. No one cares anyway. (kidding!!!
How can I start a new threat where we can collect links to University podcasts and lecture webcasts? (Or somebody else please do it - I'm new here.)
Set up a web page with a hierachical structure organised by university, the department, and subject. You might want to cross-reference by subject as well.
Although, if the universities take this seriously, they might call in the Department of Homeland Security, and if they are really, really serious will call in the RIAA.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
LOL...sorry, I just wanted to ask for a new thread (NOT THREAT!). ;-) (my English is not very good)
Should be threaD not threaT. ;-)
The attendance policy should be the responsibility of the professors. If the professors want the students to attend the classes, then it should be up to them to implement it via the syllabus. Podcasting the lecture will only benefit the students who subscribe to it and actually listen to it. I can see this doing so much more good than harm.
I say just put the podcasts up, no validation or security, free for all.
As my lecturers constantly tell us, downloading presentation slides (or really, any media with the lecture contents) isn't a substitute for actually coming along and taking notes and asking questions. If the lazy students think by sitting at home and downloading a podcast, they can get the same level of education as attending classes, let's see how it works out for them at exam time. You can give a man a weapon but you can't make him use it (in this case on himself).
They send me out Books, DVDs, Computer software with Demos.
I send them back Assignments and then Sit End of year exams.
I get to study when I feel like it. On the bus, in the waiting room at the hospital while I wait for them to scan my knee, cause I busted out on marathon training, at lunch time at work, you get the idea.
The university provides:
A sylabus,
Specific material,
Exam marking,
Assignment Marking,
An email / phone number of a tutor that I can contact to explain stuff.
I don't have:
Interaction with other students.
A set in stone time table (though assigments and exams have dates)
Lectures to skip.
If you can do a lecture once, very well, in a studio, why wates your time repeating yourself.
Let the students watch the DVD and come to you with questions.
Improve the DVD every so often based on previous questions.
Now, tell me why you care if they skip lectures and just get the DVD.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
Or take my answer: make them all available, freely and openly. I'm not having this semester's lectures videotaped, but I did three semesters ago. (The content hasn't changed that drastically, and the videotaping is a bit pricey.) I post the links to the video and the ppt/pdf/ps for the lecture notes immediately after class.
Why not? Your students are adults. I suspect I took a 10% attendance hit because of the videotaping, but the students were almost universal in saying that they liked having the videos around. Watching class at 2x speed is apparently a great trick.
Why bother restricting to just students in your class? Unless it's the cost of bandwidth, I don't get it. Perhaps there are students out there who'd really love to see the material, but wouldn't have the opportunity otherwise. Watching the video is not a substitute for the whole experience of the class (or for attending university); if MIT, CMU, and Stanford are all not worried about it, why should you be?
When I was at UC Berkeley some classes were taped by the university. Students could watch them in a special room in case they could not attend or wanted to see it again.
Usually students preferred to attend class, because you get a 3D image, surround sound and could ask questions.
I just do not understand what this discussion is about.
The word "faculty" is closely related to "facultative". It is an old university tradition that you can or can not attend classes. It should be the students choice.
The point of the podcasts is that anybody should be able to listen to the lectures at any later time. You should try to encourage attendance in some other way and/or encourage them to listen to the podcasts regularly (as opposed to at the end of the semester/term). Here are a couple of methods that I remember from my undergrad days.
1. Pop quiz once a week on the average. Since the final grade depended on the quizzes as well, attendance was ensured. If the pop quizzes include material from the lecture, they will need to listen to the podcasts regularly.
2. At the beginning of each class we had to turn in a one-paragraph summary of the previous lecture. This is similar to taking attendance, sure, but you could change this in such a way that the students absent from the previous lecture would have to listen to the podcast...
I studied for a while as an external student, we were given the lecture notes, text book reading and sometimes audio of lectures and only expected on campus for exams and maybe 1 or 2 Prac sessions per semester. The audio was good but in an odd format so I could only play it at the PC and the linux users couldn't use it nor could an MP3 player - make it easy to carry and listen to if it can be played while jogging etc it may actually get listened to. As for students skipping the lecture this could be a good thing, the ones that do attend will actually be interested and will have a better environment to ask questions etc, those that feel they do not need to be there can do something more important and catch up later. Many external students did very well with no lecture time. I only ran into trouble when work and family took up too much time and I fell behind with out the interstudent contact to prompt me to catch up I ended up listening to the last lecture for the first time on the way to the exam :-(.
The School of Pharmacy at Purdue has been doing streaming audio/video for several years. About 2 years ago, mp3 podcasting was offered university wide. This year, the School of Pharmacy has added video podcasts. With the School of Pharmacy we have seen some drop in attendance, but the attendance drop is usually associated with a big test in some other class. Early on, some professors opted not to podcast their lectures because of this, but now most of them are using the service. Some faculty members aren't concerned about attendance dropping as long as the students are learning, and some faculty members are concerned because they see it as a professionalism issue. The faculty members that are concerned have opted to either have pop quizzes in their classes, or podcast only audio instead of audio and PowerPoint/Document camera video. As far as when to post the lectures, I use an automated system to get them online as soon as possible. When we were just doing streaming, lectures would be online about 10 minutes after class. Now that we're doing mp4, there is a delay because of the transcoding. Lectures will be online usually within 2 hours of class being over.
Whatever happened to the ways college professors used to handle the attendance issue, back when I was in school in the oh-so-remote mid nineties? They had the same problem then, of students thinking that they could skip class and then just look over somebody else's notes and get most of the benefit, without having to _actually_ show up for a 7:30am class. Professors had all manner of tactics for dealing with this, ranging from the mundane (actually *gasp* taking attendance, or even formally taking 10% of the course grade from class participation, that sort of thing) through the moderately clever (requiring brief two-minute quizzes or other assignments to be completed and handed in during class) to the outright subtle (e.g., just structuring the class in such a way that actually being there really helped you learn the stuff).
Have the schools hired a new breed of professor who are unaware of these possibilities? Are the students smarter than the professors these days?
You're looking for a technological solution to an already-solved social problem that professors have been successfully dealing with for years. Just post the lectures. The professors who give the students their grades will know how to handle the attendance issue. They've been doing it for decades.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
First off, if you are a university professor, stop treating adults like children. You are not a grade school teacher. Your students are paying good money to attend your class, and though some have misplaced priorities, all are there to learn. If they fail, that is their own lesson to learn. Also, students have many perfectly good reasons for missing class - conferences, work schedules, presentations, etc. Professors should be encouraging their students to learn outside of the classroom, not preventing them from doing so.
As far as podcasts go, while I was in grad school, I took an intro biochem course where they recorded all of the lectures and podcasted it. Absolutely loved it. I had to miss two clases for a conference, and another because I was ill, and didn't have to miss any material. It was also an excellent way to review for a comprehensive final. Also, the course was taught by four profs, one of which had a heavy accent, so it was nice to be able to go back and catch all of the things I had missed the first time around.
I recently graduated from The Ohio State University. One of my Electrical Engineering professors actually video recorded all of his lectures and posted them to his website immediately after class. He put them up in Quicktime format and students were allowed, encouraged actually, to download the movies and watch them on their own time. Once he started doing this (it took him a week or so), attendance in lecture dropped by half. Although I went to every lecture, many of my friends used the videos instead. The overall reaction to this idea was nothing but positive. Most of the studious people went to lecture anyways, and some people even watched lectures AND attended class for that extra emphasis. I think this is a great idea.
I work at a small college, and have been charged by the CIO here to setup a standard process, and provide instruction to faculty on podcasting. Recording lectures are nothing new, and many Professors forbid. Those professors do not give a student permission to record them in class, and as a result they are venomently against podcasting.
Many others refuse it totally babbling on something about their intellectual property being on the internet. These same people refuse to publish a syllabus online.
Others like the idea of podcasting, but don't understand what it is. Many think that they just record the lectures and put a link to the audio file on their homepage. They don't understand the "episode/subscription" concept. As a result they don't know how to apply it to the classroom. Recording an entire class period, including the ruffling of papers as students take a quiz, or homework being returned to them doesn't exactly make for great listening material.
Unfortunately podcasting has become a buzzword in the education circles and while it has a lot of potential positives for the students, and administrations want to adopt it, many of those responsible for creating the content in large part just don't know what to do with it, or refuse it completely.
Your assumption that students who do not attend class are "bad" is in error.
I did not attent class in my final year because I was working two full time jobs to support my grilfriend who was pregnant. I carried my GPA, thank you! Podcasts would have helped!
My friend did not attend class that same year. His new employer sent a secretary to take notes for him. He got the job before he graduated because he was such a good student!
There are plenty of other reasons a good student might not attend a single class or maybe a couple of classes. Just like some employees may need a day off or a leave of absence from time to time.
Please do not make assumptions that students who do not attend classes are bad students. Bad students don't do anything - let alone listen to podcasts - regardless of how long they're posted online. Post them all online and post them all until the final is over.
I had to read that twice to figure out if the poster was assigned the job of creating podcasts of college lectures, or the poster had been arrested for doing so. I thought to myself, "Who gave Lars Ullrich the Presidency of a University?"
My company doesn't speak for me, nor do I speak for my company.
I wouldn't really worry about access to the podcasts online. From my experience if a student is skipping a lot of classes, chances are they aren't going to bother with getting notes from a friend let alone going to the trouble of downloading and listening to podcasts of the missed classes. And sometimes you would want people who missed the class to have access to those podcasts anyway (i.e. if a student was out sick or if there was a family emergency). Sure you could set up a system where students with legitimate excuses could request the podcast, but I think that would be more hassle than it is worth giving the small number of likely abuses of the system. If you're really worried about increased truancy though, be sure to include a few things in class that are not part of the podcast to encourage attendence.
I think SOME students should only be allowed to take SOME courses online.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I am finishing my dissertation this spring. I have won two teaching awards and have been teaching since 91 (went back for PhD in my field). My question to you is why should students bother to come sit in uncomfortable chairs to be one of a couple of hundred listening to a lecture when they can listen to it or watch it at their convenvience when they feel alert and ready to learn? Why put restrictions on a file so that it can't be accessed by someone who was sick or someone from another area in the university? Your post said nothing about learning the material of the class and everything about learning blind obedience to your standards. If you have been tasked with making those restrictions, I feel sorry for you. If you came up with them yourself, I feel even sorrier for you. I take teaching very seriously, and the number one thing I've learned is that you need willing students, or "You can lead a horse to water...."
I haven't seen one workable solution come out of this topic yet. So far I've seen pretty much nothing but people saying that it doesn't matter if students don't attend classes and restricting the podcast won't matter. That is not the question that was asked. The question wasn't "Is it morally or ethically right for me to do this?" the question was "How can I do this?"
There's a difference between asking for a solution and asking for everyone's moral opinion.
As for a solution that I might have, well, there likely isn't a foolproof one, since students will definitely find a way around any authentication scheme you come up with.
You could, perhaps, edit out key words and phrases from the podcast, bleeping over them, which would force students to consult the notes they would have had to have taken in class. You could have the professor tell them about the podcast, and then give a warning, "Anyone who thinks he can skip coming to the class and just listen to the podcast will be in for a rude awakening."
Borrowing another student's notes won't help much, since without knowing what piece of information goes with exactly which bleeped-out part, the podcast will be useless. A student will have had to have been there in the class to remember, unless a student from the class is willing to make an index of notes for each class and give that out. Good luck with that.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
We hear this sort of bravado all the time from students. And when it comes down to it a few of the students who never come to class succeed on the exams and mid-terms. But just as many I would guess end up in trouble for plagiarism. The average 18 year old, is well, an 18 year old, with little self-control and even less self-awareness. This isn't to disparage--I was the same way. (Though generally this seems to be more true of men than women--hence, perhaps, the growing divide in achievement between the genders at the college level).
I can't entirely explain it, and I am certainly not saying that some very few (generally not the one's who claim it) can learn on their own and have the self-discipline to succeed. For the rest (95%) attending class seems to correlate directly with achievement. (I could probably predict the grades of 90% of my students at the end of the first month on BEHAVIORAL and ATTITUDINAL criteria alone. And not attending class is a significant predictor of trouble down the road.
I have taught university courses, and there is only one worthwhile way to encourage attendance: offer classes that are worth attending. Anything else is pointless bureaucracy.
Also, the decision of whether or not to come to class should be left with the students. College students are adults who should make their own decisions. Some of them will make bad decisions that will hurt their college performances, but that's part of learning.
in my college, powerpoint is what makes the classroom experience worthless. the professor stands in front of the class, repeating the material on the slide (giving very little beyond the slide), then making the entire powerpoint available via blackboard. what in the hell happened to taking notes with pen and paper?
As the IT guy, you provide solutions for problems.
Using podcasts == a good thing.
Many Universities & other institutions use recorded lectures; some allow only access to enrolled students.
-- this is how technologies like BlackBoard & WebCT behave.
Some enlightened institutions allow free, open access to these materials.
Restricting access to the podcasts is a business decision.
What costs / benefits are there to restricting access?
As a grad student, I digitally recorded every lecture I ever attended. I learn that way.
I show up for every class, I do every homework, I listen over again to the lectures, I re-write my notes... and I still get B's.
BTW- the extra material is what helped me be a "good student".
If my classmates ever asked, I freely shared those audio files, and any notes I took. They shared notes, homework, and previous exams with me, too. If I never had access to "extras" like this, I would have become frustrated and dropped out.
Are you now asked to provide an IT solution to "bad students"?
The knuckleheads among us still failed.
Keeping it in business terms, what are the costs of trying to protect this content vs. the cost of making this professor take attendance? Has the printed attendance sheet really caused that many classroom disruptions?
If the issue is truancy, take attendance.
* Does the professor actually know that everyone in the lecture hall is currently enrolled?
You may protect the digital version, but who will keep people from watching his lecture in realtime without proper credentials?
If the issue is fair grading, then take away the 'curve', and make the exams include reading and research that isn't in the lecture.
Unless there are University rules that prohibit the full content of the lecture from being posted, I would encourage the professors to have the podcasts posted with no password, ideally with a Creative Commons license (by-nc seems ideal) but maybe with something more restrictive ("You may download one copy for your personal use; if you lose the copy, you can download another; you may make one backup"). I don't see any reason to restrict the content of the lectures to people enrolled in the course. They could be useful supplementary material for someone in another course, or for someone taking the course in a later year with another professor, or for a self-learner who can't afford university classes, etc. I suppose they could be source material for plagiarists (twice colleagues from other universities have told me at conferences that they heard of me through my detailed lecture notes which their students plagiarized), but plagiarists probably prefer written sources and may be too lazy to transcribe. I could imagine a concern that continuing education classes could lose money if the material was made available. But I am not sure how large a concern that is, and the increased public profile of the University if the materials actually were heavily used by outsiders might well counteract that.
At my school (Purdue University), most of our large lectures use eInstruction CPS Response Pads (we call them "clickers"), to verify attendance, verify comprehension, and improve participation/interaction. Our clicker answers count for about 10-15% of the class grade, distributed throughout the semester. Each day in lecture, we get a bunch of questions throughout the lecture, and answer them using the response pads. The prof. immediately knows how many people understand the material (and we know too), at the end of class, he can find out who actually attended, and they make it worth it to attend class, as they can potentially bump your grade up by a whole letter. A note: the lowest five scores are dropped, incase someone's pad heppens to be not working a given day, or that person had a bad day, etc. In any case, it seems like a very efficient case to judge attendance, and an incentive to go to class. It could be used as a basis for distribution of podcasts, but students will find that the sheer incentive of a grade will make it worth their while to attend lectures anyway, in which case you'll be no worse off making the podcasts freely available to students.
THe answer is in your very first sentence perhaps.
""I'm working at a major university in the US, and have been charged with posting pod-casts of class lectures on the internet."
In other words, you have been assigned to post the pod-casts. Have you been assigned to make policy? Are you questioning someone elses policy?
Any kind of "proof you were there" system you come up with is going to be a pain. There will be human error, mistakes, people forgetting the "magic code of the day" and so forth. You will have a much larger support bill in order to make this happen than if you just put them up for download. Are you ready for that? Have the support staff?
DoofusofDeath makes a few good points, though somewhat skirting the issue of the need for the instructor to have feedback not so much to determine who is or isn't learning, but to have a better feel for what lectures went well and which didn't so that he can attempt to modify his approach to avoid the 'bad' lectures.
:) That would not be a good thing.
But more important is that in anything short of a massive lecture like ECO 101, student interaction - either via professor questions, student questions or class discussion is a valuable part of the learning process, many times more so than the "lecture" itself. By not attending the class you are in effect cheating the rest of the class of potentially valuable input - even if it is just a totally glazed over stare into space.
Now while it may be true that the loss of any one person in a class on any given day is not a big issue, the problem is availability of video such as proposed could encourage a mass exodus, especially for those 8am lectures
My recommendation would be professor controlled access via class list, ie a checkbox grid of lectures by student names. Anyone missing lecture could go to the professor later and request on-line access. This would give the professor an idea of who is missing classes and also require some degree of motivation (and sense of guilt) on part of the student. Additionally an option can be available for the professor to release all lectures the week before mid-term/final exam.
I think there's a serious difference of opinion over what "college" ought to be that's fundamental to this discussion. Traditionally, college has meant what you described: cultural exposure, including interaction with peers and professors, combined with in-depth study of a broad range of topics, culminating (generally) in some kind of paid academic position. Most professors, being more traditional, arrange their courses around this model, and thus the emphasis on attending lectures. This model works quite well for those with primarily academic aspirations -- which mainly correspond to post-graduate students today, as the undergraduate programs have nearly sunk to the level of mere job training under the pressure of widespread attempts by parents, schools, and employers to get every high-school graduate into a "four-year" college.
The point of job training, of course, is to turn out "a bunch of trained monkeys" as you put it, and job training is really all that most people need or are capable of completing. Only a rare few are truly capable of the level of abstract thinking required for the traditional university approach, and even those who are capable of such thinking must be willing to accept an academic position afterward to make the cost of a proper academic education worthwhile. The rest just want to be made into the sort of "trained monkeys" employers are looking for with a minimum of actual work, which is the role that undergraduate schools are gradually moving to fill (over the objections of the professors, who obviously chose the academic path themselves and generally feel their students should do the same, whatever their actual abilities or ambitions). For job training, from the future employee's, certification ("passing exams") is all that's really necessary; all the rest is unwanted overhead.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I work at the the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and we have been recording and providing video lectures since 2000, and have been providing podcasts for about 2 years. Here we use the Real Media format for streaming the class video and mp3 for the audio. We also have a few savvy professors who create their own video podcast as a course supplement which are extremely popular. We do require authentication to reach the streamed video lectures and require a VPN connection as well as username and password to download the audio and supplemental video podcast files. Class attendance is not required to access the audio and video files. Here we post our files at the end of the day and do not have a problem with attendance. Some professors have insisted on 100 percent attendance in the past have had a sign in sheet every once in a while, and that is exactly what they got. For most classes attendance is optional and we post the video and audio lecture links at the end of the day. If you post your videos immediately after a lecture it is just like a live feed. We have had requests from the students to post the links immediately after the lecture ends but we feel that this may affect attendance. The effect on attendance also depends on the quality of the video ( not only format but production ) ,type of class and teaching method of the professor. For example if you have a professor who only uses a chalk board to draw diagrams and you have a fixed camera in the back of the room, the video will not serve as a replacement but as a supplement or reminder of what happened in class. If that same professor only teaches with a Powerpoint file and your camera is fixed on the screen then the student can effectively not come to class and learn just as well from the video. Our production includes several cameras, audience microphones, and an employee sitting in each class switching cameras and ensuring an excellent quality video no matter the material.
The one thing I must say is that the video and audio as a supplemental resource to the classes seem to be an invaluable study tool. We see students who go to class in person later watch the videos at twice speed and for the amount of material in these lectures that is quite amazing.
Why shouldn't it be? I understand that learning to pass examinations and learning a subject are far from the same thing, but what has being in a particular room at a particular time got to do with anything, particularly if you can see everything you'd have seen in that room later, exactly as in the original (but with the helpful extra capability to pause or rewind)?
Or it was just telling it like it is, rather than pandering to political correctness and pretending that someone whose English is inaudible/incomprehensible is as good a lecturer as someone whose English is clear and readily understood.
Discrimination on the basis of race is usually inappropriate. Discrimination on the basis of not being able to speak English properly, while doing a job that fundamentally requires the ability to do so, is entirely justified.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So, I am a college student, and I have tried recording lectures and seminars and they simply are not as effective as going to class. Math, science and engineering are highly visual, and often the large bulk of the lecture is what is written on the board rather then what is said. I mean, have you ever closed your eyes (not sleeping) when a prof is giving proof of a theorem? It's mostly alot of "and then we take this" and "now it becomes quite obvious". Also, I have found professors with heavy unintelligable accents often give themselves subtitles. Seriously. I have had (and currently have) profs that, as they speak, write it verbatim on the board. Now, that is not to say distance learning does not work, my school has a quite successful distance learning program. But they have VIDEO and audio. Perhaps if the profs slides are on the web, the student could corrolate them to the audio. That is really the only way I think it would work.
My professor offers audio only podcasts and they are very helpful. I attend class so that I know what he is writing on the board, and it is easier to understand and stay engaged. I also sometimes have conflicts and I need to make up the class and being able to listen to the podcast is wonderful. The students that just watch the podcast will probably not be able to remember the information as well and will eventually not succeed like the students that attend class.
First off if a student can read the books, listen to podcasts and take the tests and pass with flying colors There should be no problem. By the metric assigned to the class (tests, final exams etc...) The student covered the material. If you think not then the criteria must be deficient and the tests flawed in such a way that they did not in fact reveal and measure what was intended.
Lecture courses in large institutions can and should be allowed to deginerate all the way to classes on tape. You really think it makes a difference for a student to sit in a 200+ student lecture hall listening to a guy drone on and maybe scribble on a board as compared to having it on video and perhaps stills of the board to review in their own time ? The idea that they would somhow get more out of actually being there in those cases is absurd.
Even in smaller more discussion based courses you can still get the material so long as the proffessor has enough people there for the discussion. IE Discussion is important but more that certain lines of discussion comes up and that you take them into consideration as opposed to you having to actually be there to take part. Thus so long as the needed lines of discussion are explored and the material is captured in some form then you can still learn just as much from those materials as you can from actual attendence. So long as you are paying for the privlidge and getting what is needed then why should it be a problem for you to time shift courses ?
Again if the measuring sticks used (tests, essays, presentations etc..) are not sufficient to distinguish between someone who time shifted the material and someone who was actually present.... then whats the big hairy deal? If you are worried about students passing by slacking class and just listening to podcasts then make a meaningfull change to the material such that listening to podcasts alone is not sufficient to pass the test. And I don't mean some artificial attendence clause or equivalent irrelevant to the material method. Else put the podcasts out there and the let the students themselves find what works best for them. The ones that want to learn are goign to learn. The ones that don't won't. It doesn't matter if they are there or not.
Are you sure it isn't you who is worried about being replaced by canned recordings and media material ? If you can't jazz up your class up enough to avoid the material being just as effectively learned via an undynamic recording... then perhaps its not the students failing to attend class you (or the univiesity) should be worried about.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
To see what a great instructor can add to written material, just check out some lectures by Richard Feynman.
Of course, not every instructor is Richard Feynman, but a good instructor can really bring a subject to life, even quantum electrodynamics, a difficult subject to wrap your head around.
Of course, there is the chance that you will get the anti-feynman, like my linear algebra instructor. He spent the entire semester telling us what a pile of crap the textbook was, and teaching his own method. After each exam, he would berate the class for doing so poorly, and in a very exasperated tone go over each question telling us how easy the questions were.
I still went to class to try and get him to cough up more examples.
Why try to limit access, and I can't underline and bold this enough, who PAID for the content. You should encourage people to use your new service not think of ways to limit use. Usually when one thinks of user experience the goal is to add flexibility not assume a certain paridigm. If I am attending a lecture on Philosophy for example. Whether I listen to it in the comfort of my dorm room or in the narrow seats of the lecture hall should be of no concern of the school. I think it is pretty safe to assume the student is some how paying for this service, so why limit them. Let the Grade do the talking. If attendance is of importance guess who should enforce that. (Yes not the Pod Cast Website:)
Generally, in university classes, attendance is not required. Students by this time are presumed to be adults, and are expected to be responsible enough to manage their own learning. Lectures are a service provided to them to aid in their learning, a service that they are paying for. If a student is able to learn the material well enough to pass the exam without coming to my lecture, that's fine with me.
There are some exceptions, such as seminar classes in which the student is expected to contribute to the learning environment, but for a large, lecture-hall style lecture, I'd say distribute the podcasts as soon as possible, and don't worry about it if the students choose to watch the podcast instead of coming to class. If a student is allowed to skip lectures and just read the textbook, why should a podcast be treated any differently than a text?
I tried a similar experiment ten years ago with my lecture notes. I was teaching 'Data Structures in Pascal' (Computer Science II) at Richland College (Richardson TX) and UTD (University of Texas, Dallas). In my third year (just for grins) I put my lecture notes on two hour sign out at the library. My notes were about 150 pages long (single spaced) and quite complete.
1. I noteced NO drop off in calss attendance.
2. The drop rate of my class was lower in the last seven years I taught it than in the first three years.
3. The students seemed to progress faster, did better on the projects (which were not related to the notes), and showed substantially more knowledge on the Final Examination.
My overall feeling is that by publishing my lecture notes I raised the entire class by about half a grade point.
The object is to teach each student as much as that student is willing to learn. I left my lecture notes on two hour signout for the last seven years that I taught because it increased the amount of knowledge that I was able to beat into their very thick heads.
Pod Casting the lectures either increases student knowledge or decreases it. You certainly have a base line for your courses based on previous final examination scores. If the scores improve, then you certainly should Pod Cast the lectures. Try it one semester and see. That is what I did.
Tom
This is quite rediculious. How would anyone have time to go through every lecture they give and bleep out key words. And agains shouldn't it be easy to use not harder to comprehend.
Audio, or video, that is enough thanks.
People are using the word 'podcast' when no form of syndication xml is even being used.
Stop using stupid ass-fuck words!
ass-fuck moderation sheild added, to stop this getting modded to high and saving the world from moronic use of crappy words. I don't feel like saving humanity.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Using class pop-quizzes as a significant part of grade insures attaendance and alertness. My thesis adviser was particularly brutal with this technique, but we learned the material better.
Recent technology such as multiple-choice "clickers" in classrooms furthers this techique with immediate feedback to the professor of his overall effect and individual learning.
Think about it. In a typical class of around 300, you probably have about 250 "dead" bodies in the audience that do nothing but take notes and watch. Why should these people be in the lecture hall at all? I think the professor would be more willing to engage the audience if the ones who did show up were willing to participate. It might actually make sense to tell these people to stay away if they're not willing to help drive the lecture.
My personal preference would be to have a set of "stock" lectures on podcast (which could live for infinity), with the actual lectures for the semester being used for Q/A sessions by the people who want to get the most out of the course. I'd find it useful if I had an archive of past semester podcasts to root through for answers to questions. A student shouldn't be limited to only learning the material when the professor allows it. Not everyone learns the same way, so the more ways a student can learn the material, the more likely the student will retain the information.
Honestly, if I'm taking a course, in most cases I don't care about the professor. I took the course so I could learn the related information. The reason a regimented course exists is so the university can rubber stamp my level of knowledge to third persons. (This person has an 'A' knowledge level, etc.) The process that is currently in place is mainly for the university's benefit (insuring their degree actually means something). In the end it's up to the student to take away what he/she will from the course.
I'm surprised with all the comments here that I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that a student might be sick from class. I know one semester I came down with mono and almost failed all my classes. If I could've watched them from bed with my computer, I would certainly have been able to learn more and get much better results. Almost all students get sick sometimes and I'd rather they stay home and watch a lecture on podcast than come in and infect the instructor and other students.
WikiCreole - a common wiki markup language
What we do to discourage truancy is to have assigned seating. I've built seating charts for each seat in the lecture hall. Everyone is notified what seat they'll be seating in (giving priority to disabilities and laptops). If their butt is not in that seat 5 minutes after class starts or 5 minutes before it ends, we put an each empty seat on the chart. Later I go back and match up the absent seats with names on the roll. Attendance counts for 10% of their semester grade. This seems to be very effective, and after the initial set up requires very little effort.
- The university undertakes to hire good professors who are qualified to teach the subject matter and who can teach,
- The university provides a venue where the teaching process can take place,
- The university undertakes to provide access to all of the courses the student pays for.
It isn't the university's job to make sure the student attends all lectures, nor is it within their purview to punish truants, or 'naughty' students. It is the university's job to conduct an examination process to ensure competence in subject matter in accordance with state/provincial educational standards.It seems to me that students are more sinned against than they are sinners. Very often, there are labour conflicts in universities that deny the student the opportunity to take courses within the academic year. Very often, universities hire professors based simply on their demonstrated understanding of the subject matter. They do NOT require any demonstrated ability to teach or to manage a class.
Or so it seems to me.
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
I think we agree on a lot of points - the internet and online resources have opened up discussion about what a university education means in the same way as other posters have noted that cheaply available books brought into question the purpose of the lecture. I think this is good.
I'd suggest though that the outcome of the current system is broader than just training people for an academic career, and that job training needs to turn out more than trained monkeys. My concern like many others is that a rote learning focussed system isn't good enough. I agree that employers may be looking for certificates but I'd suggest a good education should produce more than an individual with the ability to pass exams and I am concerned that the GP poster feels that if they can do that, they've got an education. It's not just academic topics either, in fact these might be the easiest to learn in a rote fashion; practical trade skills are perhaps more difficult to pass on through such a system. Sit me down in front of a bunch of books about car mechanics, or cookery techniques, and I could probably sit an exam and get a certificate to say I know everything about auto engines or French cooking. But I'd make a terrible mechanic or chef. I think good employers are looking for people who have picked up the tacit knowledge associated with their field of expertise. Or at least, I should imagine that employers want to find people that can be trained and have the skills to work alongside their other employees.
I've never understood this mentality of many of the professors I have. Everyone learns in different ways- some learn by listening to a guy talk for an hour straight. Others learn by reading a book. Some learn by doing. This is the college level, so why should students be pidgeon-holed into one of these types? If someone can learn the required information and pass the tests without attending the class, more power to them.
Put the pod-casts online for anyone who has a regular university username.
If someone attends the class, they'll be able to use it to review what the professor said.
If someone is sick or busy and doesn't attent the class, they can review what they missed.
If someone doesn't need to attend the class, they can use the videos to see if the professor offers insights into something the book may be a little iffy on.
If someone doesn't care about the class, then this won't matter worth shit to them.
If there is a resource available for making lectures widely available to students, why limit its distribution? Trying to shape student's behaviour by raising barriers to information distribution is futile and counterproductive and will only hinder the "good" students access. The "bad" students will not only skip class, they will not watch the podcasts or read from a textbook or learn the material. The more free the information, the better chance students who want to learn the material will benefit.
In the old days it used to be that learning was a serious endeavor, between a professor and a student, a master and an apprentice. Now with the mass production going on at universities with stadium seating, the student needs the benefit of any technological aid that is available. Lecturing (as it used to be) is dead. If podcasts can help even marginally, bring it on without restriction.
Hundreds of answers here by bright people and you all miss the point. This isn't about the student's ability to learn. It's about having profs look bad.
There are lots of bad instructors out there who's classes wouldn't get high attendence if people could avoid it. For every good instructor around there is another who is boring. Bell curves and all that. So many professors get their positions for reasons other than teaching ability that instructional shortcomings would show up. Some of those reasons are even valid like the ability to get grant money and bring prestige from past research. But deep down professors have to fear that if students didn't have to attend their lectures many wouldn't.
University students are adults who are spending money on your class. It is their money, let them choose how they want to spend it. If they don't want to attend your lecture, that's their loss, not yours. If they want to just watch the podcast of your lecture and not attend, still not your problem. They are adults, treat them like such.
If you don't like that idea, the best way to ensure that they will attend your class is to give them a max of 3 absences. After that, they lose a letter grade for each one past 3. I hate attendance policies with a passion, but if you are looking for a way to ensure that your podcasts are not "abused" then that's the only route to go.
Trying enforce attendance at lectures by restricting access to Podcasts is so indirect it is perverse. If you want students to attend lectures, make them compulsory and register attendance or keep a class register.
Videos of lectures have been made available by many universities for many years. IME they are hardly used by students for two reasons.
Firstly. "I have to go to class" is an acceptable excuse for students to protect time for work against peer pressure to socialise. "I have to watch a video" doesn't work for this.
Secondly, the quality of videos is invariably appalling. (To make a good quality video of a lecture requires it to be shot several times from several angles/distances, have diagrams inserted in a visible form, a clean soundtrack, etc.) They take the same time, or longer (because of the need to repeat sections due to poor quality) to watch as to attend the live lecture and there is no social interaction and no chance to ask questions or compare notes with a neighbour when something is not clear.
So, I'd advise not wasting time trying to restrict access to the podcasts. Make the system as cheap and low maintenance as possible - very few students will watch them anyway.
Namgge
Lectures aren't all they are cracked up to be. Having a lecture via podcast would help everyone. Passwording it will just hurt the university because people will be angry.
THESE STUDENTS ARE PAYING REAL MONEY. Don't keep it from them. In fact, I think sometimes a podcast would be more helpful than being at a lecture. You can pause, rewind, stop to think, etc.
I just want it to be known that I was a front of the class sitter because I have trouble paying attention in the throng. If my university had podcasts I would go to class and then before the test I'd have people over and we'd watch the highlights from the podcasts (maybe edited video).
My question is this:
Students (and parents) are paying tons of money to colleges. If, for example, a student is doing well in a class, attending required labs, turning in work and tests, and making a good grade, are they really required to attend the class?
I mean, what difference does it really make if they are making the grade and doing well? To me, I'd think the university would welcome students that volunteer to do that - i.e. skip classes - because it would save on space, etc, all while the university still makes the same money.
You have been charged with making this happen at a technical level. You have not been charged to make University policy. The requirements document should be telling you how you should or shouldn't limit access to these pod-casts of the lectures.
A technical person should have input into the requirements document to make sure that they are not asking for something stupid or impossible to implement but you should not be setting University policy. Implement what they want based on the requirements document.
Bad students are bad students... A podcast isn't going to make up for it, and it is not your job to police them like you are their parents.
Put the information up for the students; wallpaper the planet with it like AOL did with CD roms. The students are paying for it and should get it whether they were in class or not.
Something tells me that a student who doesn't care enough to show up to class is still going to get a lousy grade. Drinking a big cup of coffee and watching a bunch of videos the day before an exam is not going to earn you a good grade.
There are two issues: 1) do you protect bad students from themselves? 2) when and how to post video of lectures?
The first point is a difficult issue. Bad students aren't usually stupid, but they do tend to have bad judgment. So there's a real tendency to think, "Oh, hell. There's two whole months to go. I'll listen to this shit later." Then they never get around to it, wind up with a D or whatever, and feel very let down because the teacher didn't teach them right. This may sound stupid, but there is a valid point. It's a rare person who doesn't need some handholding at some point in their lives to get over rough spots of bad judgment. So how do you encourage them to listen regularly? What I'd try is: post to a password-protected area, hand out the password for the week in class, and allow the video itself to be saved only by streaming the whole thing. The videos would then be taken down after a couple of weeks. Obviously, if somebody really wants to just get the saved version from a fellow student, there's nothing you can do about that. People do have to be willing to be helped.
The second point is much easier. I agree with the person who said audio-only wouldn't work in the sciences. Or the arts, for that matter. Visuals often include copyrighted material that can't be (legally) broadcast, which is another reason to post to a password-protected area. Keeps the publishers' legal beagles off you, because you are allowed to show the materials to your class. That's kind of the whole point. When to post would depend on the organization of the class, but certainly not too many days after the lecture, or it would get horribly confusing.
That was the realistic take for now. Ideally, eventually, the whole video or audio stream of the class, in its best incarnation, would be posted to open courseware, like MIT and Wikipedia have in the works, and anybody, anywhere, could benefit from the effort put into it.
My university (case western reserve) has been doing this for a few years now, under the name "media vision." All large introductory class lectures are taped. They're then tagged for content, so you can search for "titrations" and find videos on how to do them if you don't want to watch entire lectures.
Attendence is definately hampered. I don't think that is a bad thing, unlike many others... This is a giant lecture course. There is no interaction whether I watch the video or trek through 20 minutes of snow to go to class. Also, if I need daily interaction with the proffessor in class to pass my intro Chem course, it probably means just what the circulum is designed for; its a weed out course for a reason.
In never even owned the book for several of these classes; lectures, homework, and videos (plus videos from different proffessors who taught the same material) were way more educational anyway.
It can effect unmotivated students poorly however. If you're not careful or motivated, you'll find yourself with 6 hours of lectures to watch the night before the exam; a personal failing, not a failing of the system
Computers can make otherwise intelligent people stupid, much like slashdot.
I haven't read all comments of this obviously very popular topic. so forgive me if I'm repeating something here.
You might want to contact Suffolk Univeristy and its administration. To the best of my knowledge they record (on video tape) all lectures and make them available to students. I'm sure they have studied the effects of this on class attendence.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
If the instructor can't make his class interesting enough to get people to actually come in, or if they can pass the class without coming in just by listening to the recording of the lecture, then the class isn't actually worth attending and he needs to revise his class to make it less useless. Punishing students is not appropriate.
Along these lines I have a little story about the only class I ever failed at Yuba College. I signed up for an online astronomy class. I was sick and sleeping through the first few weeks of the class, mostly just waking up long enough to drag myself into my normal classes. Well it turns out that this online class, which has no lecture component, has to be done at the same pace as the rest of the class, and tests are locked out shortly after they're opened up. In other words, I had taken an online class so that it would be convenient, and it was not. The whole fucking point of online classes is convenience for the student.
By the same token, if the point of this isn't to make things easier for the students, why are you wasting taxpayer money on it? If the instructor has in fact asked you to lock it down, clearly they don't get it either. Technology is supposed to enable us, not restrict us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Proper testing techniques will weed out bad students. Don't test memory, test concepts, as concepts are what any teacher wants their students to understand.
Q: 2 + 2 = a, a = ? (how does this work?)
Don't test for "4", test for their understanding of how addition functions. That is what you want them to know. Testing for an answer of "4" only tests a effect of the cause, actually understanding the addition operator
I know this probablly isn't really an answer for your question, but if I can pickup all of the concepts that you teach out-side of class, then is attending your class going to help me at all?
"When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you." --leonstryker
This is a common problem with education today. Whenever you're making rules you can't help the urge to "help" those in your charge by making rules that don't discipline bad behavior, they "encourage healthy habits..." but whose habits are those?
People learn differently. If you're worried these podcasts could be used to cheat (I'm not seeing that here), then limiting someone for any other reason can, at best, do nothing. At worst it affects good students. So, a good way to protect yourself from that is to consider the many different ways a good student might learn, even if it's not your way, or what you consider best.
Consider a very good student I know who now is a successful PhD/MD (from back when you couldn't do them together) and a marathon runner. I actually know 2 such people by the way, before anyone suggests this sort of person is the only on the planet. So let's take this first student - he would go to class and study and noticed his health was in disrepair, so he'd record the lecture in class, then go running listening to the tapes. He'd repeat the entire class before finals. Over time, he went from being able to run 1mile, to 12.
Now Consider the idea of delaying the posting, or placing a login in front. In the case of the delay, if this student couldn't make it to 1 class because of a personal event, and the next class was the next day, they'd be forced to miss 1 lecture while attending the next, then listen to the previous out of order. A small loss but again, for no gain.
In the case of a login, this makes the mp3 harder to access, which on some portable devices can be prohibitive. For example if this good student had a device that could download it directly (rather than to a PC then transferred), navigating a login can present a lot of challenge, depending on the limitations of the device.
Anyway - the point is, don't limit good students. They're already working their butts off, they don't need someone telling them how to learn - they'll find their way and the best way for them will differ from yours.
Just post them the day of.
> So what methods can be used to provide these pod-casts
> for the students who actually attended class?
Imagining DRM troubles? I propose a "Broadcast Flag"...
Okay, having just graduated with a Computer Engineering degree, I know the importance of attendance in the classroom. However, this is me...not everyone is the same. For some of my classes, no class participation/attendance was necessary in order for me to get my 4.0...not many but some. Other people I know didn't have to show up to do well in some of the classes it would have been impossible for me to do well in the same situation.
My point here is: the students are paying the university to learn. They will put forth whatever effort they wish to get through the semester. If they don't want to put forth any effort, it is not your fault. They are adults and can think for themselves. We need to quit babying the up-and-coming people and instill some form of discipline...they screw up in a few classes and have to retake them they'll reconsider how to go about their life.
If, however, they don't have to show up and can do fine on their own then there really isn't much point in forcing them to go to class when they are capable of learning on their own.
Now to my suggestion:
Random pop-quizzes will solve this problem of not having the people go to class. Have a random number of quizzes (that you don't announce to the students...say somewhere between 15 and 30) and then preselect days where they will go, not totalling more than 3 in a week. However, make sure to have 3 in one week at some point to just throw them off. They don't have to be hard, just enough to make sure they are paying attention...heck, even a "write your name on a piece of paper" quiz will work for most situations. Weigh them the same as their homework and the problem will be solved. Usually there will be anywhere from 15-30 homework assignments, so the possibility of doubling or tripling their homework weight is significant enough to make them come to class. PS: I was a T.A. in my college tenure and this worked beautifully for attendance.
I attend an online university (no, not Phoenix), but it's great. With my work day changing from day-to-day, it allows me the flexibility of sitting in front of my computer at 2 am in my pjs. Since our lectures are posted on bulletins and we respond with posts, I can quickly fast forward to relevant parts. It also helps get past the useless babble that some brilliant student *tongue in cheek* may have.
Everybody seems to be forgetting something: Professors own the copyright on their own lectures. It's actually illegal to record the lecture without the professor's consent.
I wish I could have gotten to this topic earlier, but oh well.
As a college professor my experience has been that by the time they get to me most of my students no longer read the textbook and try to avoid buying it entirely if they can get away with it. I can't say I'm entirely unsympathetic to this attitude especially given some of the comments above: lecture straight out of the book, high textbook costs, etc. But when they get to me students do have to unlearn bad habits ;-).
Admittedly I do teach in a technical field which requires a lot of hands-on instruction. Sure some students could get much of what we do out of a textbook, but textbooks are often lacking in the why we do it (a fact made painfully obvious to me every time I get a new textbook to consider).
So, in an ideal world I could find (I just don't have time at the moment to write - it's on my list though) a textbook that does a good job of integrating the mechanics, theory, and practice of my field. Unfortunately those books are few and far between. Instead what ends up happening is I try to find a book that covers as much of those three facets as possible with the fewest mistakes, then heavily supplement with handouts and lectures those areas that are lacking from the text(s).
Another thing my field allows (and I require of all my students) is attendance and participation in the local professional organization. At the monthly luncheons students can get so much real-world information and slip a foot in the door for future employment by networking at these events - job leads are spread by word of mouth, a good impression can lead to an interview down the line, even scholarship opportunities crop up on a yearly basis. Are these meetings a classroom? You bet! Would it be podcastible?
HHEELLLLLL NNOOOO!
Post it all and let the kids sort it out.
Why universities insist on making students drag their personal MeatBag around campus to plop down into seats and listen to lectures is beyond me. Students could just as easily sit in front of a video cast, and if they have questions, email, drop by, or iChat with the teacher. Put the emails on a forum, so repeat questions are avoided. The professor could even make a FAQ for each chapter or topic covered in the course. In this way professors can optimize their years of teaching for more efficient learning by students.
If the class is not a hands-on lab, or an ongoing discussion, why waste the time and money on filling a lecture hall with chairs, heat, and light?
There should be an economy of markets leading virtual classrooms to destroy overpriced brick classrooms.
80% of undergraduate class contents consists of 'book learning'.
(Except for some science and art majors.)
So post everything on line, have the professor take email everyday, and have 2 days in-office hours and 1 day iChat hours...
Hard working kids will always do well, slackers who blow off their homework will fail anyway,
and hopefully learn the beneficial lessons of self-discipline.
In the long run you will improve your students' learning and faculty productivity.
On the first 'day' of class - the student should be able to download the whole course into their video iPod,
A list of assignments with due dates allows the student to produce the deliverables.
Students will have more time for social activities and social networking,
oh, and working to pay for all that schooling!
Just adding info, the minimum salary in Mexico for 2005 was about .50 per hour. BTW, no high-skilled work pays minimum salary :). A construction worker gets at least 4-5 times that, and an entry level programming job would be around 10 times that (still, around US $1,000 per month)
But yes, salaries are much lower there and even lower in China.
Reasons:
1) Your students now have another venue to review presented information and prepare for tests and labs.
2) You now have a way of grading and improving lecture presentation through peer review.
3) Eventually your lectures could be refined, and prior viewing of lectures required your lectures being replaced with "forums" that include Q&A and labs. Your new forums could also use a socratic method to further cement concepts in the minds of your students.
4) Evenually your professor's can be freed from "wrote lecturing" to spending more time in interactive teaching, research, peer-review, and refining/augmenting/supplementing lectures.
On the whole, I really think that you have a winner of an idea that is far and away an improvement from the status quo. It's the wave of the future -- embrace it!
So some guy asks a question and the majority of posts are about how his question isn't valid in the first place. Nobody asked you if the question was valid or what's the answer to another question. Thank god these kind of idiots don't work for me, since I'd have to fire their asses. Same 'ol Same 'ol.
I am a lab assistant/substitute instructor at my school. We are a technical school for aviation maintenence and many students come here because they did not do well in an academic environment. This proves to be their undoing many times as this is not the place for slackers and we do not take pity on them. The guiding logic is that one must not allow sympathy to blind you to the fact that if they can't cut it in the real world BAD things will happen. This school is for adults and we expect you to behave accordingly. As for the pod casts I hope that they will happen here - it would be a wonderful addition to the AC65 series of texts which cover the entire degree and every bit of data that you will be expected to know. Lab grades are of greater import here as one needs to meet very specific minimum standards. Attendance is mandatory and regulated be the FAA here. So that is a point where ours is a specialized environment as compared to the other schools. If they are concerned about attendance at class other colleges should simply stop holding the students hand. If they make the grade all is well. If not then the college can charge them more money for tuition. Either way attendance and grades simply stop being a problem for the institution. This may seem cruel on the surface but I must ask are we really being kind when we help others get a degree and responsibilities that they don't understand/can't perform? That F may be just the thing they need to find something better suited to their skills and abilities that will make them much happier in life.
In concert with your podcasting initiative, your faculty development office should instruct faculty on obligating students to attend class by encouraging active learning. There are a number of things professors can do to actively engage students in the classroom, and they can even require such activities as a portion of the course grade. This approach is better than a simple attendance policy. Your faculty development office could even make such instruction available via podcasts, so that busy professors wouldn't have to attend a face-to-face session. :D
Post them immediately. If a student blows off class to play frisbee only to watch (which may or may not actually happen) the podcast at a later time then this is their fault. Speaking from experience, while painful, this is a very important life lesson. I blew off many classes during a single sememster of my college experience and ended up paying dearly for it -- with my time, with additional tuition to make up failed classes and with missed opportunities. I did, however, learn a valuable lessen from this mistake: You get out what you put in. In the two semesters post-slacker, I've only missed 3 or 4 classes, a number which I could (and did, many times) match in a single day before learning this lesson.
In short, its not a good argument to withold resources from good students in an effort to force bad students to shape up. Speaking as someone recently out of college, I've found many of my peers having no sense of accountability for their actions, even though I went to a school in which I would consider the student body to be more driven than most. Maturity and accountability are just as important to learn as any of their other courses.
As has been pointed out quite a lot already ...
It isn't your place to filter the class content based on attendance.
Fact is - those students have paid for the class. It is their choice to attend or not.
The content needs to be easily accessible to the students who have paid for the class.
That's it.
Some students do quite well not attending for most of the quarter/semester - and pass by cramming.
That's their choice. Some students don't even buy the book. Again, their choice.
Having access to the class' online content shouldn't be a 'reward' system.
Many classes already make available "class lecture notes". And those are already available to anyone in the class.
They aren't disseminated based on attendance.
Release 'em as early as you can. The motivated students will get great use of podcasts whether they are able to attend or not. The lazy students won't even bother to listen to them.
There isn't a direct correlation between non-attendance and 'bad' students. For those 'good' students who cannot attend for good reason then the podcasts will be a godsend. Those that are sleeping off a hangover may download them, may _intend_ to catch up but, just like reading books, they won't ever quite get round to it. So they will be found out anyway.
Please don't put artificial restrictions on the distribution of information. It's wonderful if you can help your students with a quickly and easily available podcast. Don't start putting barriers around it.
I agree with most of the posters here. I did my Masters of Astronomy online. I only went to the University (in Australia, about 20 mins from where I lived) twice and that was for admin. Most of the class lived in the US and never came here. Good online material, and interaction by email was plenty good enough even for astrophysics work. Put up the podcasts. Let your lecturers worry about their job security and class attendance.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If truancy is your problem, the only thing you can do is make attendance a part of the grade. Now, this isn't high school, and presumably the students are adults, so if they want to skip class, no skin off of your nose. It's their money.
But if you want to make them want to come to class, dump the boring lectures. It doesn't matter how they're delivered, in person or by iPod, it's the same boring lecture. Maybe in some of the sciences, where all you are doing is pushing rote learning that's the only way to do it, especially with those 100 person introductory classes, but otherwise, make the classes smaller, dump the lectures in favor of labs and discussions and symposiums and engage the student in really brain stretching, not brain filling.
"Is this not a rare fellow, my lord? He's as good at any thing, and yet a fool." -from "As You Like It", Act 5,
Well, that's it, I'm plumb out of ideas. What you got?
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Why try to stop it?
I don't know which university you work for, but many universities will let you audit a course either for free or nearly free. Most universities don't charge for the content of the course so much as they charge for the labor that goes into the more personalized interaction. The information is cheap, the time of the professor (or TA) in answering questions, grading, and the universities name in saying the student successfully completed the course are expensive. If you are going through the trouble of posting it anyway, there's no reason not to make it publicly available from a business standpoint.
As for truancy, if it is an issue the university can challenge that by taking attendance and docking grades for missing. In my university, most freshman classes took attendance. Most classes beyond the freshmen year didn't. In the classes I felt I needed to attend, I attended devoutly, where I thought it would benefit me little, I skipped liberally. I do not see a reason to try to enforce attendance personally, but if you do there are better ways to do it than trying to restrict the downloads.
At my university we already have a downloadable lecture system for many classes. Its called i-Lecture. The class is recorded during the lecture and then posted by the university immediately after. It is a great way to manage class clashes and catch up when you feel like crap and cant make it in. There will be those who use the system to avoid actually attending the lecture, but if thats your only problem, id say make attendance compulsory or worth a certain percentage. They're also great for revision. It is rare to get ALL the notes in some lectures at the speed at which lecturers talk, or even if youre having a bad day, so being able to download the lecture and revise it is great. And if you think downloadable lectures are giving away too much of the old style schooling, then just post notes at least to help students navigate their way through often incoherent ideas. There will always be those who abuse the systems and opportunities given to them, but why is the effort measured and not just the outcome? If they can manage to do well without going to class, probably working or partying, then good on them!
Totally by accident, I attended a major Physics conference (in preparation for the CERN LHC/Large Hadron Collider coming online next year, very exciting!) & did some tests with New Mediums : video-podcast, Sony PSP, LiveWebCast over a mobile-blog. This was done with the approval of the Program Chair, who's a young UC Irvine physics professor who understands the value of Technology.
Through a major Physics blog, a USC physics prof (string theorist) mentioned the SUSY '06 conference (4th International Conference on Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions). I contacted the Program Chair, & he invited me down to do some "New Medium" tests:
http://www.jumplive.com/susy06/index.html
[ incidentally, that USC prof had a meeting last year with other profs to discuss the new "blogging technologies". There is the USC Annenberg Center, which addresses technology & communication. So, USC is "with it" ]
I recorded lectures, plenary-sessions on HD (high definition) video & other video devices (digital cameras w/video capability). I put them up on a video-blog (& its corresponding video-podcast over iTunes Music Store, just do a search on "SUSY")
http://susy06.blogspot.com/
Some of these videos are really LONG, like 240mb. I also delivered them over a Sony PSP (another big-market portable video-player, 12 million out there). Some of the videos were delivered on site, within 15 minutes of taping..near-live as iTunes video-clips. There are some QTVR panoramas of some conference events. There was a LIVE delivery of pics/videos at a Textamerica.com mobile-blog:
http://susy06.textamerica.com/
[ there are some video interviews, & some hi-res pics of talk presenters ]
There were 2 Nobel Laureates in attendance (Burton Richter/Stanford & F. Wilczek/MIT), & many big names from the world of theoretical/experimental particle-physics. Some of them were on that NOVA episode on String Theory (Brian Greene/Columbia host). Being an Elec Eng PhD, it was exciting to experience a technical conference in another field. I was given recognition at the conference, & links from their website here
[ I am currently looking for a business-entity to take my "Proof of Concept", & deliver this to next year's SUSY '07 Conference in Karlsruhe/Germany. And, to ALL technical engineering/science conferences. Please contact me ]
The purpose was like that of my target Market ("Offroad Racing", see http://www.jumplive.com/
"A better informed Public is more likely to appreciate/understand, & therefore publicly fund Science"
Physics (& Science in general), like Offroad Racing, suffers from an image problem. It's a niche-market, & the general public just isn't aware of their "activity/events". As the result, they both suffer from Funding issues (in racing, it's known as "Sponsorship"). Offroad Racing has been termed "Our Little Wonder in the Desert". Similary, Science could be termed "Our Little Wonder in a World of Idiots". You may recall the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) that was cancelled in the 80's, which was a major blow to US program in particle-physics. There was NOT a public outcry, like you see now of the HST (Hubble Space Telescope) being de-commissioned. If the Public really understood/appreciated particle-physics, perhaps the SSC could have been resurrected. Science really is getting the "shaft" in USA, & I think the Slashdot crowd is concerned about this.
I realized halfway thru my project, that these lectures over video-iPod could have value as a Research Tool. The conference attendees could re-view the lectures, especially the Plenary sessions. I even talked to a Harva
"I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam."
I'm confused. Why do you care what decisions other adults make for themselves? "Bad students"? What about the student who had a doctor's appointment during class time, for whom an immediately available lecture download would be most useful?
When I was in college, adults weren't treated like kids.
Post them a day or two before an exam. That way students can indeed avoid class, but they can't avoid the problems they cause themselves by skipping.
Lectures should be supported by whatever media you have at your disposal. I tutor more than I lecture but I am not a professor. I wish that students and staff had the means to put their ideas up and allow others to discuss comment etc. I dont use attendance records as the means of ensuring students pass, it should be about the work they hand in. If physical attendances are low is this reflected by an increase in downloads of the podcasts etc? Restrict access to those enrolled and allow them to access via remote. I work in a University that prides itself on its rural and regional access and insists that all students must do at least one online only unit. Its a start.
Thanks for the good question. This semester, I am teaching at least partly from pdf slides and I post them when I make them, even if that is before lecture. I guess I am willing to wait and see if there are any bad effects before I try restricting access in any way. I would suggest that you try to get your administration to leave you alone. You may even strengthen your case by volunteering to collect data (exit surveys or whatnot) and letting the admins know what effect having the podcasts out has. It seems possible that attendence will go up--depending on how exciting the podcasts are. I wonder if there are other prof readers of slashdot with similar experience. Best Regards, tjh
I teach a large lecture of introductory material at a large state university. My attendance policy is: there is none. Come if you want, if you don't want to attend, then don't.
However, I do ask students to accept the consequences of their actions. If they miss a lecture, they're responsible for getting the notes from a fellow student, reading the material covered, etc. As the instructor, I will NOT re-teach material that a student doesn't understand due to lack of attendance. I will, however, spend as much time as necessary answering detailed questions about a topic, provided the student has made a good-faith effort to understand the material beforehand.
Also, I do have extra credit opportunities, prizes, interesting trivia, funny videos, guest speakers, etc. provided in class throughout the semester. If a student doesn't attend class, they do miss out on all the extras. Again, it's entirely up to them.
In a class of 400+ students, I probably average around 75% attendance, and I can live with that.
The college i recently graduated from had an online course delivery tool (2 in fact). One was from a company called Desire to Learn and another was developped by my State's University system. I know that both solutions had options to allow professors to make content available at certain times to certain times. The podcast could be uploaded to the online portal and set to only be visible to people in class X. Or, in a smaller class setting which im used to, the content could be available to people that attended class. Many of my professors took attendance and figured that into the grade because they felt it was an important part of the learning process.
Your concerns..."discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam". and I thought it was all about learning.
No crazy authentications, just make it valuable to physically attend class -- the ability for students to interact.
One possibility would be to use the attendance bar code thingie to actually effect the score on the test, actually make use of the interaction.
Give quizzes in class, the person who just downloads all the notes will be disadvantaged enough by their lack of ability to participate, there is no need to artificially restrict information from people who weren't there --- they may deem they have a legitimate reason to miss (noone has a right to judge otherwise, it is only themselves that they hurt).
You really ought to look into the concept of OpenCourseWare, it's a brilliant concept. MIT's open courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/ Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL): http://cosl.usu.edu/ These initiatives are providing open-source free course materials including some video lectures available to everyone. I'm confident if you looked into the subject some more you'd see a lot more benefits than the problems you present. I'm not affiilated with MIT OCW in any way (I'm in Europe), but allow me to cut/paste a few lines from their website: >> Results have shown that: 95% of users report MIT OCW has or will help them to be more productive and effective 46% of educators have adopted MIT OCW content to improve their own teaching 38% of students use MIT OCW materials to complement a course they are taking; 34% use MIT OCW to learn about subjects outside of formal classes 56% of self-learners use MIT OCW to enhance personal knowledge; 16% use MIT OCW to stay current in their chosen field 96% of all users would recommend MIT OCW to others And we have also found that MIT OCW is having a significant impact on teaching and learning at MIT: 35% of Fall 2005 entering freshmen aware of MIT OCW prior to attending MIT indicate the site was a significant or very significant influence on their choice of school 71% of all MIT students (undergraduate and graduate) make use of MIT OCW in their research and studies 96% of MIT students using the MIT OCW site report it has had a positive or extremely positive impact on their student experience 40% of MIT faculty using MIT OCW report that the site is a helpful tool in revising/updating courses; 38% use the site for advising students http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/impact.h tm -- Finally allow me to adress the 'problems' you present in your post. >I'm working at a major university in the US, and have been charged with posting pod-casts of class lectures on the internet. Sounds like a great idea, but have you asked the question: Why? The problems you present and the possible solutions you provide for them leaves me with the big question of why you'd even bother with making the podcasts in the first place. It seems you want to make the podcasts available only because you have to and force people to attend the lectures and make it hard to access the podcasts. In my mind the why has this answer: To provide students with an additional ressource, a hardcopy of their lecture they can view if they: 1) Missed a lecture (sick, overslept or in some other way indisposed). Alternative is that they don't get to hear/see the lecture at all! 2) Review what the teacher went over in a lecture > The problem is whether or not posting the videos would allow students to skip class and just download the lecture, instead. Yes and that's a good thing! It makes it possible for people who are unable to attend the lectures to capture the essence of the lecture without actually beeing there. That could be because they're sick, stuck in traffic, attending another lecture or otherwise indisposed. Personally I doubt a lot of people will stay away from the lectures and solely listen to the podcasts, unless you don't gain anything additional from the lectures - and in that case: what's the problem? >I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam. I feel this is more of a study tactics problem that you need to teach your students through your introduction to the university / study tactics. > So what methods can be used to provide these pod-casts for the students who actually attended class? In terms of when the lecture should be posted, what would be a good time-frame? Immediately after the class? 24 hours? One week? One class behind schedule? What are you trying to accomplish here? By making the podcasts avai
The answer is buried but simple if you think about it.
the reason for requiring lecture attendance is to teach a certain 'ethical' attitude and types morality to the students.
( which of coarse is illegal because of separation of church and state in the U.S. but the 'custom' still hangs over university).
In old universities there were actually 'debates' not lectures, but that is a different issue.
I always wanted an answer to the question:
If the test proves I deserve the grade then why do I have to go to class to get the grade? Why can't I just take all the test ( when I'm ready for them. The first day of class if I can) and receive the grade?
If the test doesn't prove I deserve the grade then why are you giving the grade or the test?
too much hypocrisy.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
There are lots of ways to encourage class attendance if that's an issue:
Make attendance part of their grade.
Many "pop" quizes, just 5 or 10 points each,
but enough of them to swing you a full letter grade.
Points for class participation.
Homework can only be turned in during class time.
etc.
Could you log who downloads the podcasts and count those that download the pod cast as having attended that class? It's no different than if they'd been there and not asked any questions.
Do you have to have been a physical body in a set to have "attended" a class session? I don't know. Since this is exactly how many distance learning classes are taught I don't see the problem.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Niney percent of Life is just showing up, according to Woody Allen. So make 90% of the grade "attendance."
First of all, let me state that I'm a geek and love Wikipedia. However, you shouldn't use the Wiki as your only source of defining the word argument.
I'm sorry you misinterpret the status of Wikipedia. Wikipedia's function is not that of an authoritative primary source, it's that of a review. People reference a Wikipedia entry if it reflects their position.
For you to try to have a discussion about what an "argument" is is pretty ridiculous, in particular given the subject matter. It looks to me like you failed to learn one of the fundamental skills people are supposed to learn in college: making a convincing argument. Perhaps you shouldn't have treated as many lectures as "optional".
> I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good
> students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from
> staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam.
Speaking as a college professor, who the hell do you think you are judging students as good or bad based on how they use the information made available to them? Studying the way someone thinks they should does not make them good students, and studying the way they choose to does not make them bad students.
We educators are supposed to concern ourselves with educating those who wish to be educated. If some students can stay home and watch the lectures just before the exam, and end up taking away from their academic career what they need to in order to prepare them for the future, good for them. If some do so, and pass the exams, and even get their degrees, and forget most everything they were exposed to, and so end up as degreed chumps, the truth will sooner or later make itself obvious, and there is no way but the passage of time to determine which will be which.
I only wish I could be around to see the moment when the past catches up with those who cheat themselves out of their education, and someone who learned more, by whatever means, gets the job/raise/praise/personal satisfaction.
Make everything available to everyone. Those who value knowledge are out there and will make good use of whatever they find useful to their learning. Those who want to misuse the chance, fuck them, let them. Just do your job and don't burden yourself with those boneheads who refuse to learn by trying to punish them for their insistance at boneheadedness. We SHOULD have our hands so full with those who wish to learn by any means that we don't have time to worry about those who refuse to learn by any means. If we have time to concern ourselves with that particular worry, we're wasting time and energy and not serving those who deserve it most.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B