Starting about 15 years ago, various American universities began putting lecture videos on the Internet. This was supposed to democratize education and make the great ideas available to all. The impact of this revolution hardly registered. Canning lectures on video began in the 1960s and changing the transport medium from closed-circuit TV to satellite to VHS tape to DVD to streaming IP packets doesn’t change the educational value of a university lecture, which has been found to be minimal by nearly all pedagogy researchers. Learning at a university comes from solving problems while getting assistance from other students and teachers.
I always wondered why the various university lecture Web sites didn’t have at least a discussion forum attached to each class. That way interested Web learners could find each other. Finally there is a guy trying to create a reasonable online learning experience, using university materials as a base and standard online community tools as the medium. More: a New York Times story about the effort and uopeople.org.
I took a Physics class in a classroom that had little HP pocket computers. The teacher would ask us a multiple choice question once he had covered a main topic. If the majority of the students answered correctly, he would continue. If the distribution was random, it would indicate more time was needed.
This was the best educational application of technology I have ever seen. I never understood why people concentrated on high-bandwidth video. Non-interactive video puts me to sleep.
I spoke with a grad student long ago who told me that the set of people who learn best from lectures makes up less than a quarter of the population — but a majority of the professoriate.
SICP study groups seem to be popping up everywhere I look: a bunch of people start up a private email list and go through The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs chapter by chapter, helping each other with the exercises and examples. Maybe I should get one started for van Roy and Haridi’s Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (CTM).
The physicists at MIT’s TEAL lab seem to be doing OK:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3990.html