Editorial: Professors should take hint, spice up lectures

In a classic episode of “The Simpsons,” teachers at
Springfield Elementary are replaced with giant video screens on
which one person “teaches” live to students around the
country; at one point, he calls on “the redhead in the
Chicago school system” for the answer to three minus one.

Funny, yes. But perhaps closer to reality than we think.

Classroom lectures ““ long regarded as the staple of the
college experience ““ may become the latest casualty to the
inroads of technology. At UCLA, “BruinCast” ““ an
experimental program in which a professor’s lectures are
taped during class and then put onto the course Web site for later
viewing ““ was tested in four classes last quarter and is
available in six this quarter.

Meanwhile, universities such as Duke, Harvard and Purdue are
making lectures available on the go: At those schools, students can
download podcasts or video files of their lectures to their iPods
and so don’t even need to be near a computer to
(theoretically) be in the classroom.

To be sure, online lectures can have their legitimate upsides.
They’re good review material and help students who
can’t make it to lecture all the time. Proponents of the new
technology insist it’s intended as a supplement, not as a
substitute for the real thing.

But the reality is that if you give truancy-inclined college
students another excuse not to attend class, they won’t. Some
professors who experimented with BruinCast noted drops in
attendance. And at UC Berkeley, one professor who used online video
lectures in a class of 200 estimated his daily attendance was more
like 20.

Professors and administrators have cautioned against swapping a
living, breathing lecturer for a digital one, but when they provide
students with the digital option anyway, they can hardly expect
anything less.

Universities would do well to carefully weigh the pros and cons
of switching to online formats for lectures before jumping on the
Internet bandwagon. And at a place like UCLA that already has the
Internet option, they should be very cautious about expanding a
program whose long-term effects are still being studied. After all,
students deserve to be educated responsibly.

The reality is that online lectures are coming. Given the swift
pace of technology, it’s probably only a matter of time
before education on demand becomes ubiquitous. This is not to say
that the college lecture is dead as we know it. But it will
certainly look different in a decade or so.

Ultimately, it’s the students’ responsibility to
make the most of their education. But if anything, the people who
might best be able to take a lesson away from the online lecture
isn’t the student, but the educator. If students truly looked
at the in-person lecture experience as irreplaceable (as so many
professors insist it is), they would probably show up regardless of
what is on the Internet.

The fact that students apparently would rather watch their
computer screens than go to class could mean that class already
isn’t offering them the stimulation and interaction that they
want. Educators should take a moment to re-evaluate the way they
are reaching their students. Otherwise, they might soon have to
contend with a lot of empty seats.

“The Simpsons” proves that passive and impersonal
learning through the use of technology can be funny ““ but
only when it’s in a TV show.