It's a fantastic ingenious hack for, IMO, a model that needs to die.
There is no reason to reteach the same class every semester . The best minds need to get together and put in N (say 10) semesters worth of effort into creating the highest production value lectures that all can use until the material fundamentally changes. Most of these kinds of lectures have little to no interaction which can come at other times and the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production.
Back in about 1988, I took a required history class from a local community college. (To help make up for the fact that it took me four semesters to get through the two semester calculus course.) The course consisted of...
1. A high-production-value TV program transmitted on the local PBS channel.
2. In-person mid-term and final tests.
3. "Teaching assistants" (it was a local community college; I'm not sure what their exact status was) with office hours for questions.
It...worked. I learned the material, such as it was. As such, it was somewhat better than the worst in-person classes I experienced.
On the other hand, there was no engagement with the material. You read the textbook, watched the TV, and went in to take the tests. End of story. There were no asides---having a teacher take part of a class to look at some current event from the viewpoint of the class, having the teacher answer a completely off-the-wall question that leads to a good discussion. There were no discussions, in fact. I'm sure some of the students who knew the material got together to review for the test or something, but honestly, I don't see why. The whole experience was aimed at the lowest common denominator with no way for the teacher to dial it up for some or all students.
It worked, but it was a worse learning experience than many 500 students classes that I had from enthusiastic, engaged teachers.
I suspect that's why the model hasn't caught on, at least at the level of decent schools---people have been saying (and attempting) that video would take over from lectures literally since Edison invented the movie. (I'm sure it's more appropriate for the degree-mills of the world, though.)
Video _should_ take over from lectures, but there needs to be a model to properly replace it. On my part, I think it's an utter waste of the teacher's time to keep repeating the same lecture over and over, when he/she should be doing exactly the conversation and engagement part. It's just we don't have a good, universal model for this. I'm sure lots of places tried and succeeded, but for some reason no particular way of skinning this cat got out to become well known.
Partly, I suspect, is because 80% of the value of education is signaling, so any "revolution in teaching" would be just optimizing the 20% left.
First link is paywalled, and the second is rather unconvincing, and pales in comparison to Caplan's overly careful argumentation.
I suspect we have different lufe experiences as well. For me most education years were either a waste of time, or at least came with very high opportunity costs.
Don't think intro/extroversion plays much of a role here, I'm probably an extroverted autodidact and that's still my ideal model for learning. What I enjoy doing in my free time is completely separate from that. Sure, in an ideal world I'd have in-person lectures that are as high production value as the recorded lecture(/TV) in question, but 99.9% of the time I won't be getting those.
Only those conferences work requires me to go to. I don’t get much out of them, to be honest. I never attend meetups. (I did a few times in the past, they were worse than useless to me.)
I’ve had beers with other devs in my field, and very productive cross-industry meetings. But general agenda-less meetups are not useful, no.
> the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production
That heavily depends on the subject and the students. The goal of teaching is to teach, not to achieve a high production value of a performance in the Hollywood sense.
What really needs to die is lectures themselves. They are a TERRIBLE method of creating learning. However they are very good at creating the perception of learning. That contradiction is not surprising, it speaks to how we actually learn, by engaging with our reflection and metacognition about attempts at things that end in errors.
Eh...peer learning is nearly as effective, especially when the choice is between a peer and a teacher who holds beliefs about education based in a transmission model of education
I highly agree with you. I remember back in my university days (now long ago). We'd be in chemistry class trying to copy from the professor's writing on the board, and he went so fast that he'd be erasing while you were still writing.
Spending that time on trying to actually understand (from the student's point) and on explaining more/better instead of writing (from the teacher's point) would have been immensely more useful.
There is no reason to reteach the same class every semester . The best minds need to get together and put in N (say 10) semesters worth of effort into creating the highest production value lectures that all can use until the material fundamentally changes. Most of these kinds of lectures have little to no interaction which can come at other times and the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production.