Is attending class an outmoded way of learning while at college?

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.

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.