Bored now

In the article I read, Jimmy Wales expressed the view that lectures should be replaced by online videos followed by classes in which the material is discussed. This may work for some courses. But not all. For a start, such discussion must be heavily structured: if you just ask people "what did you not understand from the video?" the responses will vary from "everything" to "nothing" to "I didn't watch the video". And if you're structuring the discussion, why not structure it around the story? Why not tell them the story and ask them to stop you when they don't understand and ask for clarification? And how does that differ from a lecture?

You could try structuring the discussion around explanatory examples, but to be honest that's how I try to structure the story. You could try structuring the discussion around problems and questions, but we already have those discussions: they're called problem classes and are an equally (if not more) important component of the degree course. Maybe we should have more of them? That's fine as long as the students are prepared to do more questions.

Relying on student-led interactivity is fine, provided the students are interactive. For many reasons, difficult to control, a particular class may not be interactive in a useful way: too many dominant personalities, not enough dominant personalities, intimidating or apathetic individuals who change the whole mood of the class. The format of a lecture gives individuals a safety net: a particularly reticent class will still learn, a particularly enthusiastic class can turn it into more of a structured discussion.

Making videos of lectures available afterwards seems like a more workable idea, reinforcing what they have already seen. Sometimes you need to see something twice or more to get it. Our students are already inundated with difficult ideas and information. I'd rather present them with the opportunity to see it again than provide them with too many different videos to watch. Having said that…

…I have seen Khan's fifteen-minute videos and I think they're wonderful. I have tried to emulate them, with mixed success: you can see the results on Youtube. Some people like them, some people think my teaching style is flawed. Such feedback is welcome (I'm always ready to learn) but there are lots of teachers out there, so you don't have to like my teaching style. Judging by the number of views, the most useful videos I've produced are the ones where I picked something I explained badly in class and explained it again (either verbatim or through an example). Of course you don't know which these are until after class when people say "I didn't understand".

I think Khan's style of videos are an effective method of teaching and ultimately I think academics will take it up more and more. But to say that they should replace lectures seems bizarre: I think it's patronising to assume that our students have fifteen minute attention spans. These videos are at best a supplement to lectures. Lectures are there to give a bigger view on the world, how it all fits together. Some last an hour, some last two hours. Some people get bored.

While I'm at it, I also think it's patronising to assume that our students are bored and not getting anything out of lectures. They're at university because they're enthusiastic and interested in their subject. They want to learn about vector calculus, about representation theory, about studying functions on infinite-dimensional space. They know the material is painful and difficult, many of them relish that fact: it's why we study our subject, to break open our minds and experience the wonder of comprehending a difficult and beautiful idea. Sure, you can try to jazz it up with technology, but at some point the pain and the effort kick in and there is some extremely hard work to be done.

If you didn't want to think for yourself, you shouldn't have signed up for a degree.

Jimmy Wales says that he thinks lectures should have a pause facility which means they need to be online. I agree that would help when you're revising or reviewing material and particularly if the lecture is being given in a foreign language. But I'd contend that live lectures have a much more useful pause facility. You put up your hand.

Or if the lecturer's antisocial and talks into the blackboard, you shout out.

You say "Could you write bigger?" or "Could you explain that again?" or "Could you give us another example? Slower?" or "What does ‘cohomology' mean?". Some lecturers might not like it. I do. I would like to think of lectures as structured discussion rather than an exercise in dictation.

My students last year were great at this and my lectures were punctuated with wonderful questions and comments like: "Which of those ys have dots on them?", "We still can't see the dots from the back" and "Could you just use a different notation?".

Some students are too shy for that, you might argue. They're worried about feeling stupid in front of their peers. Their peers who are sitting around, equally perplexed, but silent, who inwardly want to ask the very same questions. They're going to have to take responsibility for their own learning sooner or later. Part of university is about learning how to learn, how to ask questions and get the information you want. When academics mutter disgruntledly about spoonfed students who have been mollycoddled by the system, this is what they mean. A lecture class will get much more out of their lecturer if they show that they're engaged, if they actively seek out the answers to the questions inside their heads, if they try to iron out the conflicts in their own understanding. Terry Tao, the Fields Medallist, recommends asking yourself "dumb" questions as a great way of learning, even (/especially) for researchers, because if you can't work out the answer to a "dumb" question then the question is not dumb (and nor are you).

Jimmy Wales says that when he was being taught by a boring lecturer he went and found some video tapes about calculus instead. I fully empathise. I have done the same thing many times. Indeed, universities are full of resources for people who want to learn about stuff. One of those resources is lectures. If you know how to use them, you will get a lot out of them, even if you're bored. As technology moves on, so will the range of resources available: screencasts, online discussion forums, wikis. We should experiment with all of these and see what they have to offer. But that's no reason to cut out lectures, which form the core of the university mathematics experience.

There are times when they're deeply inspiring, times when they're incomprehensible and, yes, times when they're deadly boring. But if you, as a student, engage with them and actively try to get something from them then you'll find that lectures are can be as effective a means of communicating as the best-written book or the best-planned video.