I *completely* understand your frustration and agree with you that something along the lines of what you propose *must* be done.
As an electrical engineer with minors in mathematics and physics, I had a whole heck of a lot of university courses to attend. In addition to this workload, I also completed all the premedical requirements. After graduating with an EE, I started medical school and completed the first two years. I then completed a two-year information technology MBA program and have since returned back to medical school as a third year medical student and am currently working in the hospital. I plan on combining my technical background with medicine and business to start a high-tech medical firm.
Along the course of my education, I have had probably a hundred university courses spread out over nearly 11 years. I must say that the amount of information presented in all of those lectures could probably be condensed into about 15 classes spread over 3 years. What an incredibly inefficient use of resources, energy, and money!
What I have found is that it is a rare professor who actually takes the time to *hone* their lectures and edit them until they are concise, clear, and *optimized* for learning. Usually, they simply reuse lectures from previous years without even attempting to update them and improve them because it is such a time consuming task. Should we require them to do so? Is it efficient to require them to do so? I don't believe it is.
It seems that, while there may be a million different ways to present a lecture on "muscles of the eye" or "binary tree algorithms", it's probably not the most efficient use of time/money/resources to require a thousand different professors/lecturers across the country to produce a thousand different lectures on the same topics. To then require them to repeat this information year after year, day after day, or even several times a day seems like an incredible inefficiency in the educational system.
An "open source" methodology might very well be applicable. Can the energy and resources of so many geographically separated professors, students, and colleages be pooled to produce organized, concise, and clear lectures freely available and accessible to all? Can such order be produced from such chaos?
With the incredible rise to prominence of "open source", and in the larger scale "open collaboration", such a system is at least a possibility...
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I *completely* understand your frustration and agree with you that something along the lines of what you propose *must* be done.
As an electrical engineer with minors in mathematics and physics, I had a whole heck of a lot of university courses to attend. In addition to this workload, I also completed all the premedical requirements. After graduating with an EE, I started medical school and completed the first two years. I then completed a two-year information technology MBA program and have since returned back to medical school as a third year medical student and am currently working in the hospital. I plan on combining my technical background with medicine and business to start a high-tech medical firm.
Along the course of my education, I have had probably a hundred university courses spread out over nearly 11 years. I must say that the amount of information presented in all of those lectures could probably be condensed into about 15 classes spread over 3 years. What an incredibly inefficient use of resources, energy, and money!
What I have found is that it is a rare professor who actually takes the time to *hone* their lectures and edit them until they are concise, clear, and *optimized* for learning. Usually, they simply reuse lectures from previous years without even attempting to update them and improve them because it is such a time consuming task. Should we require them to do so? Is it efficient to require them to do so? I don't believe it is.
It seems that, while there may be a million different ways to present a lecture on "muscles of the eye" or "binary tree algorithms", it's probably not the most efficient use of time/money/resources to require a thousand different professors/lecturers across the country to produce a thousand different lectures on the same topics. To then require them to repeat this information year after year, day after day, or even several times a day seems like an incredible inefficiency in the educational system.
An "open source" methodology might very well be applicable. Can the energy and resources of so many geographically separated professors, students, and colleages be pooled to produce organized, concise, and clear lectures freely available and accessible to all? Can such order be produced from such chaos?
With the incredible rise to prominence of "open source", and in the larger scale "open collaboration", such a system is at least a possibility...