Recently I have become aware of a new trend, college classes on video. The idea behind this is that a small local school can save money by firing their professors and simply buying video courses taught by professors. The students still get lectures and the school saves on the cost of hiring a live person. Win win right?
The problem here is that it assumes that the sole reason people go to school is to hear lectures. In fact, people pay to go to college to learn. These two concepts get confused because, in college, most courses are taught via lecture. Thus it seems to be an easy substitute to replace professors with video. The truth is that lectures are only part of why students go to college and pay such a high premium to do so. While it is true that 100 level courses are largely lecture, text book reading and memorization based. As a student progresses into higher level courses, class sizes get smaller and training becomes much more interactive. Classic techniques such as the Socratic method, thought experiments, lab work, and many others serve to teach students to think on their feet, apply the knowledge they have learned and learn how to interact with people. To reduce education to simple video lectures and memorization for tests misses half the reason students go to college. Learning is more than simple memorization, and to reduce it to such is a disservice to students.
A good example of this appears in the work of Charles Dickens. Much to my embarrassment I can't remember which book. But it's an indictment of the pure memorization education system. Essentially a teacher asks a student what a horse is. The student replies from wrote memorization "a four footed ruminating mammal." Then the teacher points outside to a horse pulling a cart and asks the child what it is. The child doesn't know despite the fact he was just asked to define it. The reason being that despite memorizing the correct answer the kid had no practical experience with a horse, nor even knew what one looked like. In this simple anecdote Dickens showed all the short comings of relying solely on memorization to teach students. Were the lecture the student was watching a taped lecture, he would not have had that interaction with the professor. He would have continued in his ignorance despite having the correct answer to the question. In short, the child would have continued on in his ignorance.
Also, from a practical matter, college costs a ton of money. State schools now charge in excess of $20,000 a year just for a student to take classes. Private college can cost $60,000 a year. More over, the value of a college education has never been more questioned. With record unemployment after the financial melt down of 2007 and 2008, experience has become more marketable than a degree. College kids now frequently graduate hugely in debt and end up not being able to find professional level jobs. So they are forced to live at home with their parents, work low level jobs part time and barely get by. For a school to reduce the education to merely watching movies seems to further cheapen the value of the education received. It becomes much harder for a working class family to justify the cost when there is no payoff in either education or in the job market. Instead of 4 or more years invested in a future, it is four or more years and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars wasted.
For a degree to have any meaning, the student must both have learned a lot of knowledge, and know how to apply it practically in the modern world. Reducing school to filmed lectures and memorization marginalizes the latter half of this equation. Were I still a student, I would think twice before going into debt to essentially watch a series of videos and have my grade determined solely by a few online computer graded tests. You don't pay for the lecture, you pay to interact with experienced college professors who are in the upper echelons of their fields. Schools should think twice before removing professors from their educational equation, because they may just find that they will no longer have customers.
