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."

Comments

Why does it matter if they come to class?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[westlake]

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

But are they learning if they are not part of the interaction between the teacher and the class?

No questions asked, none answered.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[AuMatar]

Sure they are. If they can show they understand the concepts (via tests or assignments) they're learning. I found the vast majority of my learning was not in lecture, and with some profs lecture actively made me stupider.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[DoofusOfDeath]

why are you concerned if they come to class or not?

I can think of a few possible reasons that might go through instructors' minds:

• It would be very difficult and/or painful to try to fully test students on every detail you'd like them to know after taking a course. So having them there in person adds two ways to build the instructor's confidence in the student's knowledge:
  • Knowing that the student is physically present and maybe even listening to the lecture/discussion makes it a little more likely that the student learns that day's course material than if the student simply played frisbee on the quad.
  • Especially in smaller classes, the instructor can gauge the student's level of knowledge based on how he handles class discussions.
• In some classes it can be valuable to have input from many students during a class discussion. This is sometimes true in technical courses, but perhaps more often true for hippie touchy feely liberal arts courses where no one is wrong and diversity is valued.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[LuYu]

But are they learning if they are not part of the interaction between the teacher and the class?

No questions asked, none answered.

My initial reaction to this story was the same as (great?) grandparent post: Why should the students attend lectures at all? In fact, I did not understand this mentality even before podcasts. There is this really old technology that deprecates lectures entirely, it is called the "book". Books are lectures you can read at any time for any reason.

Now, if there were a discussion or a question and answer session, the student would have a reason to attend. The student could learn from the professor's vast experience, and the student could ask questions about specific things not covered in the "lecture" -- or textbook or video or podcast or whatever.

Lectures were made obsolete in Europe by Gutenberg in 1447. Why are "teachers" still using this method in the classroom? If universities want to make money, they should do so by answering student's questions, not subjecting students to boring lectures read a hundred times over from yellowed notes.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[DavidinAla]

Your reasons why students might want to attend class might be perfectly valid, but they have NOTHING to do with whether the podcasts should be posted immediately without regard for whether anyone shows up or not. I don't think class attendance should affect a grade in the least. If a student can pass whatever tests are given (written, oral, projects, whatever), he ought to pass. Giving credit for "class participation" is a way to artificially help students who test poorly and is always subjective.

With that said, I think students generally learn much more by showing up in class. But that ought to be the student's decision. If he thinks he's a hotshot who doesn't need to attend class, let him try. If he fails, he has nobody to blame but himself. And in some classes that I had (the ones with nothing but straight lecture), attending class would have been a waste of time if I'd had audio of the lecture available.

I think podcasts ought to be posted as soon as the material is available. Let the students use it (or not use it) as they see fit. They'll soon figure out what works for them.

David

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[buswolley]

My professors often podcast, or make mp3's of the lecture. Let me tell you, if you thought the lecture was boring in person, wait till you here it over headphones.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[lexDysic]

The reason you want people come to class is that good (even decent) professors react to their audience. While it's not practical in a 200 person class to answer every question during lecture, I (in my calculus teaching) am constantly monitoring the faces of those who are paying any attention at all. Do I need to give another example, or can I skip through this topic quickly and spend more time on the next?

Some could make the argument, I suppose, that since calculus doesn't change much, there should be some Platonic "Ideal Lecture" out there, and once that has been recorded, no lecture need ever be given again. However, the fact is that although calculus doesn't change, students do. The mathematical knowledge of entering students changes from quarter to quarter (the students who are "on track" typically need less review of the previous course's material), from year to year, and quite noticably from decade to decade.

Most professors do react to students, although it never occurs to them to let the students know that. This is a fundamental reason for having a human teacher as opposed to just books. Students who consistently do not attend class, or who attend without paying attention, are impairing the ability of the professor to do exactly this, and the class as a whole suffers.

--
Think! It ain't illegal yet!
George Clinton

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[Txiasaeia]

"Lectures were made obsolete in Europe by Gutenberg in 1447. Why are "teachers" still using this method in the classroom?"

So, in your opinion, reading a book is a more effective method of teaching foreign languages, for instance, than teaching foreign languages through an interactive lecture format? What about people who find it easier to learn by hearing than to learn by reading? Finally, I take it you've never taught at the university level, but how many students actually read assigned texts? (Too few, unfortunately.)

University classes usually consist of two informational sources: textbooks and lectures. Both are meant to augment each other and neither should be stand-alone. Unless you can show that an average first year university student would more effectively learn a subject from a book alone than from a combined lecture/textbook format, I'm afraid that you're missing the point.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[bigdavesmith]

Agreed!!!

The number of professors I have had where it's best to just ignore what the professor says in lecture and read the book or study on your own from various sources is amazing. I had a networking professor who would seriously tell you incorrect things during class, and then the exams would contradict what he had said (and agree with the book instead). Luckily for us, we argued him out of most of the questions where he had taught incorrectly.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Questions? At lecture?

I was talking to Dr. Sadoway at MIT about exactly this the other day. If you raise your hand in lecture, he'll throw you out. But recitations (1 hour, 2 or 3 times a week, with a TA, in classroom-sized instead of lecture hall-sized groups) are entirely Q&A sessions. He posts videos of the lecture and doesn't care if you don't show up - there's no interaction anyway, and so many people show up that he doesn't feel the loss of students. He said one student would use the video lectures entirely, because those allow pausing and rewinding the difficult parts.

If you're talking about a class that's taught somewhat interactively, then this may not work. But if you're talking about a large one-way lecture, go ahead and post the lectures immediately. There's no harm to the learning process at all, if you're going to be sitting for an hour and watching the professor talk anyway.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[Fallingcow]

I'm not the person to whom you were replying, but languages are a skill, which is a different case from many other things that you learn at university.

Absolutely, once you understand the language that we use to talk about language (heh), reading a book is probably the best way to learn the technical parts of the language, especially grammar. That's pure knowledge.

Being able to understand the spoken and written language quickly and easily, and to express oneself in that language in a like manner, is a skill. Practice and repitition of a skill is necessary in order to learn it, and in the case of language, this is best done with the aid of a mentor or teacher.

Many, many things that are taught in the classroom would be learned at least as efficiently through simply reading up on the topic. It may be a bit more work, but it should yield noticably better results (you have to really understand simple calculus, for example, before you can move on to the more advanced stuff, as you won't have a teacher to use as a crutch while you're studying the harder material)

As for students not reading assigned texts: there's a very good reason for this. It is because many professors just teach the exact same thing in lecture that the book taught, without skipping anything (or, at least, anything that will be on the test) or assuming knowledge of the material in the book. Result? Reading the book and then attending the lecture is damn boring. If you read, though, you still need to go to the lecture, because there will be a handful of things mentioned that weren't in the reading at all, and that'll be on the test.

So, it makes no sense in this case to read the material, because it, along with all the info that's not in the book, *will be covered in the lecture anyway*. Reading the material is a good way to make the lecture even more excruciating, for no gain whatsoever.

I'm sure that there are lots of professors who don't do this, but there are enough that do that it trains many students into this behavior. If they already had themselves trained to it, then this does nothing to break them of it (why should they start reading the book if they don't need to AND don't want to?) It doesn't excuse all cases like this, as a good number are surely pure laziness on the part of the student, but it's a BIG part of the problem.

Worst of all, it even discourages those who would normally read the text even without a grade incentive, because the repetition of the same material (not just discussion of it, which would be good, but rote repitition) in the lecture actually acts as a disincentive.

If your goal is to get the student to read the material, repeating it word-for-word in class is actually worse than not ever talking about it at all!

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[rjstanford]

I'm even have a degree in English.

Hmm. Did it come with any kind of money back guarantee?

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[matzebrei]

My initial reaction to this story was the same as (great?) grandparent post: Why should the students attend lectures at all? In fact, I did not understand this mentality even before podcasts. There is this really old technology that deprecates lectures entirely, it is called the "book". Books are lectures you can read at any time for any reason.

Except that even a good book does not entirely deprecate a lecture. The teacher's goal is to get the knowledge to "sink in", and, unfortunately, this does not always happen with text. We all have a mode in which we comprehend and remember more completely than other modes. A good class/lecture will have visual, audio, and possibly tactile components to maximize the chance that every student will come away having learned the topic.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[tfried]

While I tend to agree with the general idea of your post, it's important to realize there are different types of "content" and different types of students.

Some different types of content:

• stuff that is readily available in well written textbooks
• stuff that is spread out across different textbooks and scientific articles, so it is useful to summarize it in one good lecture
• stuff that is so advanced or difficult or controversial that it seems very important to debate it and its implications
• finally learning to collaborate with different people on a project/task/subject is a very important part of a truely useful education

Some types of students (not mutually exclusive):

• students who learn really well from textbooks
• students who learn much better, if the very same text is read to them aloud by a living human being
• students who learn from asking questions
• students who learn form answering questions
• students who learn from explaining something to other students
• students who are able to motivate themselves efficiently, and learn on their own over long periods of time
• students who need to be pushed every once in a while or even frequently in order to get something done (these may not make the top-notch employees later, but there's no reason to drop them altogether)

Many if not most students will be aware of some, but not all of the factors influencing their learning.

What it boils down to is: (Most) lectures really are an important service, even if many students don't actually need them at all. Some students would downright fail if they would not be forced to attend lectures, or at least take frequent tests. It's not easy to strike a balance, here, but here are some guidelines I just made up:

• If the lecture has more than 50 students, regularily, there will never be meaningful interaction on a high level. Provide the podcasts right away, and don't force attendance. Rather provide voluntary weekly quizzes, and mandatory monthly (small) tests. This way you ensure some pressure on students who need it, but leave at least some freedom to the others
• If the lecture has more than 20 but less than 50 students, ask yourself honestly, what type of content you're trying to teach. Is social interaction an important goal of teaching? If so, read below, else follow the instructions above
• For small lectures, you'll probably want to encourage interaction as much as possible. Depending on the type of content this may be encouraging discussion, encouraging students to teach each other, or designing practical tasks the students can work on to solve (instead of just telling them the theory). You'll try not to guide too much, even let your students venture down dead ends sometimes, just to show them where that would lead, and teaching them to recognize it. Providing a podcast of such a lecture may be useful but probably isn't. Requiring attendance is probably useful.
• Don't use mere size of the lecture as the only criterion, but consider your goals for the lecture, and what you know about your students. Judging a lecture by its size is a useful initial heuristic, however.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[xsonofagunx]

I've heard of professors (one that quickly comes to mind is Alexander Shulgin, because I've read his books) that would make a syllabus which said which parts of the books to read, and then not talk a bit about them during the class lecture. Instead, they would cover other things which weren't in the book, sometimes go more in depth about certain subjects which were only briefly covered in the texts, and sometimes just go off on tangents of their own which were related to the field, but wouldn't be covered in any text. The only thing that allowed him [Shulgin, in this case] to do this was the students actually having to have read the text, because if they were to go to the lecture without the background in the book, they would be completely lost.

I think this is an excellent method of teaching (though it may not seem like it, especially to people who hate reading textbooks). The lecture wouldn't just be a rehashing of the assigned reading - it would be a complete departure from it. One would have to familiarize themselves with the textbook topic, or the in-depth coverage would be meaningless to them. Not only does it encourage reading of the assigned materials, it also encourages students to come in to class, if just to find out what their professor was going to chat about that day. This may only be feasable in classes with somewhat interesting topics (or to students somewhat interested in the topic, regardless of its general interest), but I think that even if you're just going for the credits you would have far more incentive to attend lectures as well as read the texts if it wasn't the same material you had just read being covered again.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[elrous0]

Two words: Professor egos

Having once been in academia myself, I can tell you that MANY professors would rather you indulge their sense of self-importance than master the actual material.

-Eric

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[JesterKnot]

The answer: It depends... (Isn't that always the answer?)

...upon how the student learns and what the instructor is trying to teach.

Everyone learns differently. Depending upon which study or promotion you believe there are between 3 and 36 basic learning styles. At a minimum there is visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Since I learn visually, a podcast would be brutal for me, and most lectures are difficult, unless the instructor used visuals well. At some point I had to learn to 'translate' from something like a podcast or boring lecture to pictures - either in my mind or in my notes.

Still, I skipped ~35% of all of my engineering lectures, because of my preference. I went to my senior dam design class twice (almost getting kicked out the second time because my professor didn't know who I was) and earned an A. Unfortunately, I had to re-calculate a half dozen formulas that my 800 page manual had wrong. Had I been in class the handouts would have corrected this. I also would have learned less had I been in class!

The other side of the coin is what an instructor is trying to teach - and I'm not just talking about the subject matter that you can get in a book. The most important thing I learned from an engineering school is how to engineer. The best classes were the ones where the professor made a mistake 30 minutes ago and had to go back and find it, and where a student asked a question that stumped the instructor.

As a tutor and instructor myself, a good portion of time is used in teaching a student how to learn. For example, if a student came in with a question about his MS Office class (no Gates comments please), I would spend most of my time teaching him how to read the book. Technical and semi-technical computer books are impossible to read if you don't know how. I almost never answered the question directly. This frustrated students at first, but they thanked me later for it, and many times did not need any more tutoring. Another student came to me with a Psychology question, so I taught her how to use the index of her book and read in context to find the answer for herself.

Lecturing is different from tutoring, but I found myself still needing to teach students how to learn. I taught a basic math class at a community college. 40% of the students were there because they had forgotten the material (over 40 years old), 50% didn't learn it in high school (under 20 years old), 5% had to take it as a prerequisite, and 10% had no clue how to add percents. I felt this was part of my responsibility to teach some learning skills, since they were paying to learn something that they had no tools to get and retain the knowledge properly. As a result, I had pop quizzes and random homework checks to encourage class participation, and had mini group projects. From this, the better students were able to help the poorer students, and some of the poorer students improved in their learning.

I viewed it as my responsibility to encourage both the good and poor students to come to class - good students to help during class discussion; poor students so I could teach them how to learn better. Ultimately, it is the students' responsibility to learn and do the work. The level of your students, how they learn, the content of the class, your teaching style, and the needs that arise all go into determining whether students need to come to class.

So to answer the original question: First, I would setup a simple, optional password to allow students to get the podcasts, either a per lecture password or per class password. I would set up a structure that allows the instructor to setup when the podcast is available, and if a password is needed, and the frequency of the password. This allows them to direct how to use this tool is used, and covers his responsibility. Students would talk to the ins

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[m0nstr42]

Late post, probably won't get any attention, but I was asleep dammit.

Anyways, my wife is in medical school and this is absolutely how it is done. They immediately post every single lecture as mp3 audio. No video, which makes it a little different (maybe better?). It may be a little different for undergrads, but come on, college means self-responsibility. If a student chooses not to attend lecture, it's their loss. Sometimes it can be a gain - I have absolutely known people who will skip certain profs because their presentation is so terrible that it is actually detrimental to the learning process.

Re:Why does it matter if they come to class?

[Dolohov]

Oh, I've definitely had those curly brace arguments. With my advisor, even. :) The same advisor I got into knock-down drag-out fights with over comma placements, too.

The thing is, the really arbitrary rules are generally optional. These rules tend to apply to commas, hyphens, and word order. Even spelling can be flexible when multiple traditions developed separately (as in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia) But it's to everyone's benefit to have as much agreement as possible, and it is to your particular benefit (if only occasionally) to know and use the most common spellings. Try looking up "grammer" and "grammar" in Wikipedia sometime.

But when there are plain, hard-and-fast rules, it is simply ignorance or laziness to not follow them. Pluralization and the use of apostrophes in contractions are such cases. It has never been correct to write "its" in place of "it is", or "it's" to indicate that a thing belongs to some "it". If you stop and think about it, it's clear which to use -- and your writing becomes that much more readable.
As it is, people who actually know the difference see these errors and write off the writer as lazy, whereas people who do not know the difference will not care. It's the same philosophy behind wearing clean clothes and not smelling bad. You can argue that these things are irrelevent to whether people ought to take you seriously, but that's kind of beside the point. (OK, OK, some will say that it's actually the same philosophy behind using the right fork at dinner, but I tend to equate that more with writing "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux" when writing somewhere RMS might see.)

I highly recommend the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss. It's pedantic as hell, but entertaining and informative. Possibly persuasive, too ;)

None let non-students view?

[Anonymous Coward]

None let non-students view? That doesn't seem very useful for the rest of us.

Re:None let non-students view?

[Fallingcow]

I don't see what would be wrong with having the more static subjects, like algebra, lower-level calculus, undergrad chemistry, physics, history, etc., primarily taught by video lectures. After a few years of working at it, a handful of lecturers in each field would be recognized as having the best recorded lectures, and everyone would just use those.

Any university-level classes for those topics could exist simply as a battery of exams to verify understanding of the topic, preceded by a period of time (say, a semester) during which the student has access to an expert in the field and goes to them with questions, but just watches the videos and reads printed material most of the time. Anyone who wants to learn it but doesn't want to pay and doesn't care about any kind of official recognition of their understanding of the topic can just pay for the videos, or download them for free (it's not like they'd need to keep making new ones, after all), or whatever.

Labs, language classes, and higher-level courses could all be taught the traditional way.

Why not?

Re:None let non-students view?

[CAlworth1]

A great many colleges and universities do allow general public access to their lectures. These mostly depend on the professor, as in the case of Professor Gerald Cizaldo at the College of St. Scholastica. His postcasts, from a wide variety of biology and physiology courses are available through his website (or this xml page).

Many more can be found at http://directory.edufeeds.com/

Disclaimer: While I don't attend classes at CSS (great acronym, eh?), I did work there this summer as part of an internship.

Just release them

[eikonoklastes]

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?

Re:Just release them

[rolfwind]

Depending on class size, the deterrent is already built in.

Small Classes - If they skip, the students will not be able to ask the professor questions. A podcast is just not the same.

Big Classes - What, then is the difference? Students can rarely ask questions or interact with the professor anyway.

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.

Why?

[MadUndergrad]

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.

Re:Why?

[Fallingcow]

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.

A-fucking-men.

This would fix one of my biggest annoyances with my university: professors teaching Gen Ed-required classes that no-one really wants to be in (nor cares about in the least) at 8:00AM and 9:00AM *only*, every semester. These are truly lecture classes, where you would get *exactly* the same experience from watching the video, except that you could sleep in that extra hour or two.

As you can tell, I don't have too many gripes about my university, for something like that to even be an issue. Still, it'd be cool to have a solution.

There have been SO many classes where I could have skipped through the lecture videos, pausing every 5 minutes or so to make sure that the topic hasn't changed, then just done 30 minutes of web research on the topic, and been fine. Repeat for every exam, and only go to class for the exams. GREAT.

I'm thinking especially of "Intro to Psychology" and "World Religions", the former of which told me NOTHING that I hadn't learned by the end of high school (and much of it I'd learned in junior high science classes... but yet, most people in my class did poorly on the tests... WTF?) and the latter of which could be completely replaced with ~2 hours of reading Wikipedia.

Obviously, it'd be better if they'd either make the classes worthwhile (probably draw complains from people who don't care about the class because it's not part of their major, but damn, if you're paying for it it might as well teach you something) or not require that we take the classes at all, but video lectures online would be a decent alternative.

Re:Why?

[Grym]

Interesting story. I had an 8:00 AM Microbiology class whose professor insisted on not only taking attendance but also having assigned seating... for a 500 person lecture class. To make sure you weren't tardy, every day he would have silly little thought questions for people in groups (determined by the seating arrangement) to solve and/or quizzes. To accomplish all this, he had a team of about 15 TAs that facilitated everything. All together, attendance accounted for 15% of your total grade.

Suffice it to say that I'm not a morning person and have always had a knack for microbiology anyway, so I was rarely present. I would review the material the week before the exams and made A's on them all. About halfway through the semester, when I was taking my third exam--I kid you not--the professor stood over my desk the entire time, watching me take the test. I can only guess that he thought I was cheating somehow--that there could be no other way to ace his intro-level material without attending. LOL

The more I think about it, there's a reason why the tests were so easy: because he spent half the allotted class time obsessing about attendance. In the time it took for him to orchestrate all of those quizzes and attendance rolls, we could've been covering more material. And what about the TAs? The class had to be ridiculously expensive to administer if they were paid.

For large classes, I just don't get the point of even beginning to worry about attendance. Education should be about the knowledge gained, not gratification for the professors or some rite of passage in the form of an 8:00 AM pop quiz. Furthermore, I've seen too many mediocre students use attendance grades as a prop for their low test scores. I say post the podcasts, and if nobody shows up to class just do what any upset teacher has a right to do; make the tests harder.

-Grym

Just post the damn podcast

[Aeron65432]

If a kid chooses to not attend class but still listens to all the professors lectures, why prevent him from doing so? He is learning the material, no different from attending the class.

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.

Re:Just post the damn podcast

[thesupermikey]

exactly what i was going to say.

there are still problems with skipping class and just listening to podcast, such as, if they have any questions about the material, both in the podcast and in the reading, they will not have the opportunity to ask them

also, if podcasts are only online for a part of the time, there is nothing stopping students from getting podcasts from someone who has saved them all.

Re:Just post the damn podcast

[Anonymous Coward]

As a univeristy lecturer, I can say that the response of the class affects the nature of the lecture. you look for signals to see if students 'get it' and you hone your presentation to that.

Allowing the student to observe the lecture without being observed reduces the quality of teaching and the quality of the leanring experience.

Attendance should be compulsory as it improve the quality.

University's bottom line?

[DesireCampbell]

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.

Re:University's bottom line?

[nacturation]

No kidding... that was my first impression upon reading the summary. Why would any university want to babysit its students? When you're a child they take your attendance. In high school, they generally expect you to be there but don't make too huge of a fuss if you're not. And in university, you're the one paying the bills so if you choose not to take advantage of the lectures and you still learn the material enough to meet the course requirements, then why babysit your customers?

Part of the university experience is learning the balance between freedom (not going to class and doing what you want) and responsibility (attending class because you'll usually learn more that way). Remove that freedom and you're just preparing a generation of mindless workers who will be unable to cope unless some manager is watching them punching in and out with their timecards.

Instructor's responsibility

[JonMisurda]

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

Re:Instructor's responsibility

[neonprimetime]

I've taught at the undergraduate & graduate levels before (C/C++/Data Structures, etc). Here's some simple simple ideas
- base a portion of the grade on attendance
- display some information just outside of the view of the podcast (ex: most cameras are stationary and don't cover the whole room) and make sure that info is on the exam
- weekly quizes that force them to attend

Re:Instructor's responsibility

[spectral]

As a graduate student who teaches a C programming course, why do you care if the students are in the room with you?

If they can watch you on video, they get the exact same amount out of the class that they would have if they sat passively in the room.

If there are external methods of asking questions about things that weren't clear on the video (newsgroups, for example) that you moderate but don't even need to respond in, then they can ask questions and get just as much out of it as they would have if they were sitting in the room actively asking questions. More so, in fact, since it's 1) easier for the other students to skip over stupid questions, and 2) recorded, so you can go back if it was just "I didn't hear that because I was staring at this girl over here", and the responses are recorded (on the newsgroups themselves) so that they can go back in the future to find out the answer.

If the student already knows the material, why force them to waste their time sitting in the class? Either let them test out of it (most colleges won't allow this), or just shut up and give them the quizzes. If you're testing what they need to know, and that's what you were teaching, then congratulations.. if they pass your test, then they know the information you were supposed to be giving them. What's the problem here?

Provide them the info, don't babysit

[neonprimetime]

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.

I hate this "school" of thought.

[spectral]

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.

Re:I hate this "school" of thought.

[atomicstrawberry]

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

I would ask that too, since it should become x = 10.

Re:I hate this "school" of thought.

[Iznogood]

"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)."

3x = 2x + 10 => x = 2? Only for extremely weird values of 2...

a good way to get people to attend class

[poppen_fresh]

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 post the lectures

[Dragoon412]

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.

"bad student?"

[drDugan]

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.

Just post it!

[mattmacf]

The problem is whether or not posting the videos would allow students to skip class and just download the lecture, instead.

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.

This is Tech for Tech's Sake (fer chrissake...)

[RobotRunAmok]

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.

A suggestion:

[graznar]

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.

Re:A suggestion:

[lee1026]

However, don't you think that professors have better things to do then to do roll call everyday? Besides, that may take up too much time in a large class.

Make attendance "mandatory"

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

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.

Podcasts not as good as transcripts

[Outatime]

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 college's simple but awesome solution

[Desolator144]

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.

Re:Good students will still turn up

[Manchot]

Have you ever considered the possibility that many of your so-called "good" students could fall into your "other" category if they wanted to? That maybe they just decided to actually get their money's worth by truly learning the material? Or, on the flip side, have you thought that maybe the "other" students are just lazy, and don't know the material as well as they think they do? That a 65% average doesn't indicate good understanding? Just wondering.

What's the big problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why attendance may be necessary

[truthsearch]

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.

Re:Why attendance may be necessary

[wandlero]

After teaching for 8 years now as several different titles [TA, grad TA, Lecturer, etc] I have never once reported attendance to the department, college, or school. In fact, I have only ever taken attendance the first couple days for those "if you don't show up the first day, you are dropped" classes. This is at a public state university, which brags about the state/federal funding and such. If there is a link/reference, I would love to see it. I am now teaching a large lecture style class and I am interested in making it valuable for the students to show up, and this is a perfect topic for me.

As a student, I hated classes that graded on attendance, for the same reasons given by many others - if I choose to not go, it is my money, etc. What does sitting in the class do for learning?

However, as an instructor, I value the interaction - and getting students to talk has been my most difficult challenge. When presented with the opportunity to change the class away from a lecture setting, how should it be handled? What should the format be? I don't know. Still thinking about that one, and trying some things.

Don't let the bad students stop you

[wolvesofthenight]

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

It matters only who.

[AlexanderDitto]

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.

Re:It matters only who.

[Cobralisk]

Your comments are enlightening but disturbing to me on a personal level.

Decaf

Is this what the world is coming to? And yes I can tell you're a Math/CS major. You're here. But can you explain why all math profs have a heavy foreign accent, poor grammar, and bad handwriting? Attending lecture is one thing. Understanding the words is quite another. For the orignal submitter, stop trying to fight a War On Truancy, and just make sure the podcasts have GOOD audio quality. Attending class is an important part of the educational process, but adding layers of policy tends to bog down a university and promote a more 'us against them' mentality, its just bad for morale. 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. Make it worth their while to show up, but since you're providing a service to the students anyway don't withhold the information from those who couldn't make it (they did pay for the class at least). And the bright side is if you're helping otherwise poor students learn more despite themselves, this is a benefit to all parties involved.

Re:It matters only who.

[austad]

How is attending class an important part of the educational process? If a student gets the assignment listed in the syllabus in on time and passes the midterms, it means he has learned the material. My last two years of college, I went to the first day of each class and only showed up to hand in homework and take tests, and I still learned a ton. Some people learn better on their own that listening to someone with a horrible foreign accent talking and writing jibberish on the board.

Re:It matters only who.

[LuYu]

But can you explain why all math profs have a heavy foreign accent, poor grammar, and bad handwriting? Attending lecture is one thing. Understanding the words is quite another.

In this case, a podcast would be better. At least the student would have the chance to rewind parts of the lecture the student did not understand and review them until understood.

Re:It matters only who.

[RyanG]

It doesn't even matter about the good students or bad students. Students in general already have an abundance of resources to aid them in all classes. Tons. Good students utilize them while the bad ones do not. If you introduce one more resource nothing is going to change. The bad students will still ignore it and the good students will be the ones taking advantage of it. Im in my last year of Computer Science and a few semesters ago one of my professors had a before-test session before each test. In this session he would solve problems on the board almost exactly like the ones on the test. This resource was almost priceless. Guess who only came? Only the good students that actually cared and could probably do the problems without being there anyways. The ones already in need of academic help never bothered to come. My point is bad students are going to treat this resource like any other. Put up the podcasts and do some good for your fellow classmates that care.

Re:Good students will still turn up

[Achromatic1978]

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

im in the "other" section ... 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.)

I'm not sure going from 40% to 65% is a stunning recommendation of how you never need to attend lectures, because you know it all already.

Good students will use it more

[boots_the_monkey]

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.

As one of the 'good' students

[heresyoftruth]

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.

Abuse will fix itself.

[The Step Child]

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.

Exactly, most of the time it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a university where students pay big bucks to attend and the author is worried about truancy?

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"? ... Roll Tape...

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.

Online Learning

[pele_smk]

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!

Attendance

[ennuiner]

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.

None of the above

[Morphine007]

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.

Post the lectures with no authentication at all

[d_jedi]

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.. )

University Students = Adults

[Bodrius]

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.

Truancy!? High School or Uni?

[misleb]

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

Don't bother

[TLouden]

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).

Re:MOD PARENT UP!!!!

[Fallingcow]

Skills are one of the sets of learn-able things that are often best taught by a live person. The ability to use a language is definately a skill, and happens to be one that especially favors live teachers as the best learning method.

Many, many classes at a given university are not like that at all.

In order for, say, a history class to be worthwhile, you need either
A) informed discussion of written material that draws heavily upon the superior knowledge of your professor (who is, hopefully, much better-read than the students) or
B) original communication from the professor, that has not yet been put down on paper (or, at least, not widely published) and is also worth learning (the prof's pet theory about some particular author probably DOES NOT count)

B is very rare these days, and can be considered nonexistant at the undergrad level for all practical purposes.

A is less rare, but far less common than it should be. It requires small class sizes, which aren't the norm at many universities, and especially in lower-level classes.

I would go as far as to say that, for most majors and at most universities, roughly 2 years worth of a 4-year bachelor's degree could be more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently learned through simple reading, with ZERO interaction with professors.

For many majors, it's very nearly the whole four years that would be better devoted to just reading the right material.

Yes, classes in addition to the reading would be great, but the classes should augment the reading, NOT the other way around. The point of the classes should be to help you get more out of the reading more quickly than you could on your own, not just to teach you every damn thing out of a given book when you can read it yourself for free (assuming a nearby library has a copy).

Hands-down the most valuable thing that I've learned at my university is that, for probably 75% of the stuff taught here (not just in my majors, but in ALL of them) at the undergrad level, I can read the material and teach it to myself better than I can learn it from some professor who's just telling me what the book says. For that discovery alone, I see my time here as having been worthwhile.

It builds moral fibre

[EmbeddedJanitor]

In my day, we had to walk through 6ft of snow and sit on stone benches in unheated lecture theatres. We wrote with goose-quill pens and had to keep ink bottles under our clothing to stop it from freezing. We did all our calculations with tables & slide rules. Ever since calculators and ball-point pens came in, students are getting soft. Half the reason to come to university is to build the moral fibre needed to be a a leader in industry. We had to sit through lectures and so should the kids of today..... blaah, blaah blaah.

That's basically what this all boils down to.

it depends on what "a successful education" means

[fantomas]

"If a student gets the assignment listed in the syllabus in on time and passes the midterms, it means he has learned the material"

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.

Re:that's not the point

[badboysdriveaudi]

"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?"

Let me give you a few examples because I've run into these situations.

1. You'd rather have Professor A than Professor B, but if you sign up for Professor A, the class time conflicts with another class you'd like to attend. This has happened to me numerous times.
2. You'd like to take a class (regardless of whether you like the professor or not), but can't do so because you also have to work to pay the bills. If I could get the lesson on video and watch after I get home from work, that would be awesome! Yes, this has happened to me as well, so I ultimately had to work less because I couldn't trade hours. Those semesters sucked because I basically scrapped by on peanuts. It would have been better if I had a choice.

Lecture webcasts from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, ...

[Liam7]

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/

Are there any podcasts available to non-students?

[sorak]

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.

Re:Are there any podcasts available to non-student

[Liam7]

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 taking an MS this way

[OSXCPA2]

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.
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 .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.

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!!! ... mostly...)

Re:it depends on what "a successful education" mea

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But is this a successful and complete education?

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)?

Though your comment about lecturers having horrible foreign accents suggests that a little bit of cultural exposure might also be useful for you.

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.