Problem is that in many of the top CS universities today the lecturer is just a top researcher who's forced to read off of slides for a couple of hours a week and doesn't have the time, desire, the skills or the incentives to be a great pedagogue to the hundred or more students sitting at his/her lecture.
In many universities it does feel like you're basically paying for a very expensive real-life recording of something you could have just watched online. Sure, there are TA office hours, but is waiting in line to talk to a TA for 10 minutes a week worth tens of thousands a year?
IMO we should focus on teaching meta skills as soon as possible, teach people HOW to learn, and then let them be auto-didacts with opportunities to practice their craft and be surrounded by other people struggling to be great at the same skill.
This is obviously not talking about high stakes professions such as surgery, where perhaps the traditional approach is the best we can do until computers can vet our skills.
I studied computer/electrical engineering at my institution. A year or two after I graduated, the CS department lost their accreditation. I wasn't surprised when I heard the news. Of the CS classes I was required to take, one was ostensibly on operating systems. It was taught in C, the grad student lecturer only knew Java. Another instance, we were studying MIPS architecture. The professor was moonlighting in a start up that was going under, and couldn't be bother to show up to lecture, and the TAs he sent were clueless. The EE/CPE students that had already studied this stepped up & taught the class because the TA was inept and the prof never showed. I was super pissed when I got a D on my project on a minor technicality, despite having basically taught the class in the absence of the prof and a competent TA.
What institution was this if you don't mind me asking? I can't say that I much enjoyed the CS courses I had to take as part of the computer engineering program myself, as it was mostly taught from power point and definitely the material in lecture was mostly useless for projects and such. MIPS architecture, though, was really fun and the instructor was great but kind of a jerk at times.
In many universities it does feel like you're basically paying for a very expensive real-life recording of something you could have just watched online. Sure, there are TA office hours, but is waiting in line to talk to a TA for 10 minutes a week worth tens of thousands a year?
IMO we should focus on teaching meta skills as soon as possible, teach people HOW to learn, and then let them be auto-didacts with opportunities to practice their craft and be surrounded by other people struggling to be great at the same skill.
This is obviously not talking about high stakes professions such as surgery, where perhaps the traditional approach is the best we can do until computers can vet our skills.