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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

Lecture delivery is not anywhere close to 100% of teaching a university class. But just focusing on lecture delivery, your argument still doesn't work. Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.

I will say your view is very common among outsiders. I've heard it so many times from people that think I'm too dumb to notice something so obvious. Unfortunately lecture delivery just isn't a big part of the cost of teaching, and the online format only helps if you phone it in by never changing anything. If you do change something, you have the massive expense of recording the whole lecture all over again.

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> Lecture delivery is not anywhere close to 100% of teaching a university class.

Absolutely true.

> Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.

This is obviously going to be true for vocation-focused classes, but am I wrong in thinking that this is going to vary from field to field? Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?

Also, this is not a real argument, but I have seen universities where lectures were given by a professor, and Q&A office hours were provided by a TA. I imagine that some universities are thinking that they can have a professor write a lesson plan and record lectures, and then the class can be run in perpetuity by a team of grad students. (Cue laugh track.)

> Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?

This is one of the cases where you could (assuming the students don't change much). I teach macroeconomics. So far in my career some of the bigger events have included the bursting of the 90s tech bubble, 9/11, the Great Recession/financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis, Brexit, the election of Trump, and the pandemic. When I started teaching 20 years ago, the profession had settled on talking about managing long-term economic growth and viewed business cycles as being of secondary importance.

Yeah, absolutely. It's like people forget that teachers give assignments, answer questions, grade homeworks, run exams, and you know, do an actual job.

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