

Is attending class an outmoded way of learning while at college? - grellas
http://chronicle.com/article/Actually-Going-to-Class-How/126519/

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kunjaan
I would brave the Boston snow and wake up early in the morning to attend some
of my grad school lectures. I LOVED the interactive nature of attending
lectures. I loved listening to concepts unfold. I loved listening to other
students ask questions and responding to them. I loved the debates with the
profs. I loved interrupting the prof and asking him to explain it in a
different way or providing better analogies. I miss school.

Here are what I think makes a good lecture series:

1\. Small class of students who are not forced to take the course. I hate
those "Intro to" courses that we force students to take just for the credit.
These kinds of students ruin everything. They hate it when people who
genuinely want to learn interrupt. They hate the assignments and any form of
work. They hate extra references and readings.

2\. The teacher should be free to be interrupted. There should be enough
buffer in a class for questions. I hate it when teachers come jam packed with
3 hours worth of lecture slides in a 3 hours of class. These are the kinds of
classes that are best watched in a video.

3\. The teacher should ask questions and have students respond to each other.
A healthy debate is the BEST part of the classes. You really do change as a
person with these discussions.

4\. We need to go fully prepared for the lecture. In grad school, I didn't
have classes every single day, which would mean I would have time to go over
the slides, glance on the topics, look at previous assignments and just be
prepared for what was to come. You end up constructing a LOT better questions
if you do this.

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SkyMarshal
Good article, glad to hear it. I always hated lectures because I'm not an
aural learner, I have to read and do to fully understand and internalize.
Daytime college lectures always broke up the most productive part of my day
into small chunks that I would have otherwise been able to use to go to the
library or lab and get into and stay in flow for long periods. All that was
left was evenings, after I was already mentally tired.

One caveat though is that at top-ranked schools, the professors use the
lectures to introduce material so new, often from their own research, that it
hasn't made it into textbooks and other course materials yet, and that an
unannotated copy of the lecture outline just wouldn't cut it for understanding
it and exam prep. If there's no graduate-student-note-taking service for that
course, you have to go.

