You'll save money in the short-term but in the long term you'll destroy your economy as you won't have the highly educated workforce that will be required to be a competitive economy in the future.
We should focus on high quality education first, whether that uses technology or not.
And logistically, what happens with 'live people' is that some people ask their own questions, which the lecturer will make some attempt to answer. It's not like a lecture format somehow provides the interactive benefits of a 1-to-1 tutorial for every student in the audience simultaneously.
Cite? You can't just base this huge claim on some hand waving about how you can rewind and pause things. You need a study showing how wildly successful a school based on recorded lectures is compared to traditional lectures before you start leading all of society down these paths.
"homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand" implying that we should only test (and thus only teach) skills that can be tested by computer rather than the skills that we want students to learn. Basically you'd be wiping out essay type questions (which test depth on knowledge) in favour of multiple-choice (which test breadth).
> switch to ereaders
Unless they're seeing different ereaders than me, that kills most detailed and colored diagrams in science textbooks. Also makes the experience worse in many geography, history, etc. courses.
> abandon the practice of lecturers performing the exact same lecture term after term when a recording will do
Recordings don't pause to answer questions mid-stream. A chat room or forum is probably good enough for upper-division courses where students have probably learned decent learning skills, but even freshman college courses probably need a human available at some point. Suppose they could be restricted to study sections...
> move towards homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand...
There go essays and critical thinking questions in every literature class, to start with. Also a lot of the more useful evaluations in my engineering and science courses probably couldn't be marked by a computer.
To be clear: I think Coursera and similar efforts are awesome, and are an excellent supplement to college educations. I think they could also manage partial replacement of a minority of college courses. But especially with typical college students, who are not self-directed learners, I don't think it's the kind of replacement that will help budgets much.
Agreed! Worse, in my mind, is that e-readers are good mainly for linear access of read-only text; textbooks are much better at random access and user modification. I love my Kindle, but I think it sucks for books I'm trying to study seriously. Flipping back and forth between diagrams and text, jumping back to look at previous pages, putting in bookmarks, notes in the margins: all stuff paper is much better at.
And really, the price of textbooks isn't high because they're printed on paper. It's because textbooks are expensive to create, and many markets have a small number of suppliers, giving them crazy pricing power.
And now that I think about it, textbooks are a tiny proportion of what schools spend, which is in turn a small portion of government costs. So I now regret that we've all been fooled into wasting time on a proposal that makes no sense.
Recordings can be paused a hell of a lot more easily than a lecture for a large audience -- the format typical for heavy-enrollment basic classes in most colleges.
I realize that googling something may fall a bit short of the ideal, but it's better than just sitting there quietly because you don't want to interrupt everyone else in a huge room. Also, those aren't your only possible options; for example, students could time their lecture viewing to coincide with the office hours of a TA, and actually be much more able to get questions answered in mid-lecture. Or you could watch lectures with a study group, and talk through points of confusion with your groupmates. Or you could [fill in the blank here!]
People would have to write down their questions while watching the lectures, could probably watch the lectures with fellow students in a TV room with the tutor room right next door in the library or right in the tutor room on their tablets.
TA-level pay grade markers would mark everything.
This wont work for everything, but it will work for the vast majority of courses. One building the size of a library with a combo study hall / cafe could probably cover the needs of an entire university.
On the other hand, a biology book that old is going to be missing a whole lot of key stuff; probably even knowledge of the Krebs cycle was too new to be reliably appearing in school texts.
Perhaps instead educators could band together to produce open source textbooks.
a) live lectures are crucial for the interactive element
b) the best, modern textbooks are necessary for acceptable education
sound reasonable but don't stand up to much scrutiny.
> Perhaps instead educators could band together to produce open source textbooks.
You would think there'd be more interest in 'spend once, solve forever' initiatives like that.