> All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.
When I held the course for Infosec 101, I made sure that everyone on the course knew two things on the first day:
1) slideware was NOT the study material, they were complementing the lectures and acted only as memory aids
2) the exam was deliberately designed and scored so that it could not be passed by merely trying to learn from the slideware
That gave the students two options. Either attend the lectures and read up on some of the external course material, or try to read all of the listed material and figure out what I'm going to emphasise in the exam. Most of them decided to attend. It probably helped that I was happily cultivating the legend of me being completely loose cannon and able to pull off pretty much any kind of stunt if it helped to make the material more memorable.
When I held the course for Infosec 101, I made sure that everyone on the course knew two things on the first day:
1) slideware was NOT the study material, they were complementing the lectures and acted only as memory aids
2) the exam was deliberately designed and scored so that it could not be passed by merely trying to learn from the slideware
That gave the students two options. Either attend the lectures and read up on some of the external course material, or try to read all of the listed material and figure out what I'm going to emphasise in the exam. Most of them decided to attend. It probably helped that I was happily cultivating the legend of me being completely loose cannon and able to pull off pretty much any kind of stunt if it helped to make the material more memorable.
It worked too.