The students referred to in the article don't have the wherewithal to study effectively on their own; the lectures are their only hope for learning, assuming they were to take advantage of them. Also, many classes are not simply lectures, but an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. By not coming to class, one robs themselves of that opportunity.
And being honest with yourself about which duplicative work you actually don’t benefit from (vs. which work is “boring” or interferes with sleep/whatever other excuses).
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
At the same time, the time is given because not everyone will have time to read ahead of time. That 15 minutes at the start is their calendar block; think of managers who have back to back meetings all day.
It's not some referendum on people being careless.
The courses I never attended a single class for were reading screenshots of a textbook.
Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.
I don't engage in class to show off or try to contribute, but because it's an incredibly valuable part of the learning process for me.
As a professor I had once put it, "This is difficult material. I don't expect you to understand it from just one lecture. You need to read the material before the lecture, but it will only be after you've struggled with the problem sets that I would expect you to understand it."
Teachers that can only read their notes and write stuff on a board without ever interacting are of the most useless kind. They're completely replaceable by course material.
Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.
The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.
In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.
The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.
Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.
Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.
Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.
The author is talking about PowerPoint slides that were presented to the students as valuable information.
I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes.
But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.
One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.
I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.
I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)
Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.
This is massively true IMO. Taking detailed notes during a lecture is an absurd waste of attention - we have universally-available recording technologies. Use them.
Use lecture time to do things you can't do with a recording: interact.
(Yes I'm thoroughly aware that student interaction is a myth and it pretty much never happens - I've zoned out in classes with attendance scores too. Except for several classes that many people can remember where it does happen, those don't count and there's surely nothing special about them that is worth learning from)
Shocker, that. Multitasking worsening performance? Surely that can't be a super-well-demonstrated-repeatedly phenomenon.
There simply isn't any pedagogical justification for withholding information post-lecture that was deemed important enough to be included in a lecture. Everyone knows this material is critical to understanding the course. If professors want simple optimisations to help students learn then they would be doing something like organising lecture material to promote spaced repetition.
You need to have time to process, but when you have to take notes there is a speed at which you just skip processing and instead all of your focus is in transcribing as efficiently as you can. I imagine, the speed differs from person to person. For the most of this course, the teacher hit this speed. And she knew she would hit it. So it seems universal.
If current student generation is worse at taking notes by hand, it could be a real disadvantage for them
Technical subjects achieve this with labs, too. It doesn't scale but we see clearly that scaling isn't always very desirable, especially if it leads to this regression.
You can follow along and keep 2-3 slides open at a time to have a better sense of the context, skip back to review an idea, screenshot and get clarification with AI, there are so many possibilities which enhance the lecture.
Some professors also write/diagram right on top of the slides and then provide them after class.
A lot of CS classes have switched to GitHub, with basically entirely open course materials.
Even on closed systems like Canvas, it's typically an entire library of content that you have access to.
I personally love lectures, but I'm also not doing a typical degree program, where I'd be forced to take 3-5 courses per semester. If I was under that much workload, I can't imagine having the time to absorb all the material, do all the work, sleep, and go to every lecture.
Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else.
I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).
I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.
in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.
Although I do sympathize with many of the author’s broader points.
I would add that reading this piece and the attitude the author has towards students, I doubt I would want to attend their class (or possibly even take it in the first place, professors have reputations).
I had one such professor in accounting. Typos, numbers from wrong year, copy/paste mistakes, forgot to turn on precision as displayed, mismatching account numbers, etc.
The textbook (written by someone else) also had mistakes. At least not in every exercise, but enough to be annoying.
Exams were also graded based on an incorrect solution, so you always had to fight for a revised grade.
Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.
And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/
Now anyone with a computer connected to the internet can have access to the best lectures in the world. People talk a lot about employment, diploma mill mentality, student and professor ethics in this thread.
But I think the silent revolution, one that has nothing to do with AI, is that nowadays anyone can learn and acquire basically any knowledge based skills they might want. I have always lived by the maxim "don't let school get in the way of your education". And I also think that education is a life long journey. Fretting about the state of complex systems is an exercise in futility. Educating oneself has never been easier and I love it!
That is shameful. Instead of doing that, they should have given that out upfront and then spend the class discussing it and helping those who still had doubts/questions.
But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?
But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.
From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.
Mostly that students are all giant piggybanks that spit out tuition every year. And, from experience, a lot of administrators view themselves as doing a service for marginalized students (who are often more likely to come in ill prepared and wash out like this). They are generally old and paternalistic (and sometimes a bit racist) and often just assume that all such students need lowered standards rather than what they actually need (a kick in the pants and plenty of resources to help them get their shit together).
So I could listen to lecture at 1.5x speed and skip any parts I thought were filler. Of course I didn't show up to class...
TFA omits this trend (seemingly since wide spread availability of the internet) to being solitary - the view that nothing of value can come from interactions with peers or superiors other than wasted time. [this is different from missing classes because of laziness which is implied].
You raise a good point, but in this situation I would usually either: 1) go to office hours or 2) ask my question to other capable students.
Unfortunately, some colleges doesn't value efficiency nearly as much as they do their self respect. Because of which we now have strict attendance requirements (75%) for every course.
(Things are of course different when there are practical considerations to the teaching, such as labwork, which of comes with a degree of associated testing anyway.)
Jeez I wish they would have uploaded all the material online, not everyone does that (perhaps thinking if they do it lots of people won't show up). And even if they do it , it is often sparse slides with half the material passed in person - so very missing. It's enough to not understand the first 10 minutes of the lecture and then you're completely lost for another frustrating 35 minutes ( or more, some lectures are double). It's enough not to fully remember the last lecture and you don't follow what the professor is talking about now. It's not a fun experience and happened to me a lot - the material is hard, my intelligence is good but nothing stellar so it's super easy to become lost.
The truth is it's probably better for the average person to study at their own pace with an LLM or something like that, I had a real rough time following computer science lectures. I can ask the LLM to stop, to re explain, to re explain in a different way etc etc. If I'm tired I can stretch a bit. I think its the really bright kids or those with superior concentration and preparation skills that got something out of those lectures, the rest of us hated it.
If the university isn't going to invest anything in lecturing, why should I attend the lectures?
My brother and I graduated from university a little over 4 years ago and we were both top students (he studied music and I studied applied math). There were classes where he and I (without exaggeration) skipped more than 90% of the lectures.
I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.