

Fuck boring lectures - cyberboy

Fuck boring lectures<p>Lectures are probably one of the most wrongly used tools these days, I won’t say there isn’t a prof. using a lecture in the way it supposed to be most certainly aren’t.<p>You probably know this kind of lecture: You are in a lecture where you are going to learn the most awesome subject in the world. You are excited and you can’t wait for the prof to start his lecture!! And than something magically happens, I don’t know how they do it but all the excitement drops to a negative level. I need to slap myself in order to keep my attention and that’s the moment I realize that the prof did it again, make something really boring!<p>The weirdest thing is in a lecture that the prof starts reading the things on the lecture slides. I always wonder if he thinks I’m some kind of idiot who cannot read?!<p>What I want are lectures like Walter Lewin gives on MIT (http://ocw.mit.edu and here’s a promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zc9Nuoe2Ow_). He can make boring stuff even fun and entertaining with some kind of magic touch! That are the lectures I’m willing to pay for, because right know I’m paying a lot of money for my boring lectures where I don’t go to most of the time and that annoys me.<p>I’m replacing more and more lectures by fun ones on the internet, sometimes from khan academy, sometimes just youtube videos and sometimes partly courses from MIT open courseware and Standford online courses. I’m also really excited about the udacity (http://www.udacity.com) courses. But in general I’m realizing that I’m slowly replacing my university courses by online courses because they are just more awesome!<p>Are there more people doing the same thing? Because than we may want to reconsider how our university education system works and if this is the most effective way of teaching students?...
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cgshaw
The biggest problem is that the average teacher or professor doesn't really
understand neuroscience.

Understanding how the pre-frontal cortex and other parts of the brain is
critical to keeping us from playing solitaire during class. Connecting with
people through emotion, sights, sounds, interactivity—that's where "lectures"
should be headed, but the professoriat won't have it.

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polyfractal
I think the bigger issue is that many just don't care. Academia is structured
such that the metric for success as a professor is measured by your academic
research, not your teaching skills. You gain tenure by producing quality
research...while only requiring a pulse in the classroom.

Many professors don't care, and those that _do_ care often have had zero
training about how to actually teach. It _is_ a skill that has to be learned,
few people are naturally gifted at teaching difficult concepts to other
people.

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rcoleb
Should be "Fuck Boring Lecturers" :D Bad teachers will be bad teachers, no
matter how they're teaching.

And yeah, I'm totally doing this. I don't have the money for a degree, but
that doesn't mean I can't learn.

