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I think you're right to have reservations about the usefulness of recording lectures - I don't think lecturing is the right mode of teaching for remote learners. A lot of the point of a lecture is being there - information is emitted and absorbed via non-recordable, non-transmissible interactions between the lecturer and the group. On a really pragmatic level, I say that because I've done a lot of transcription of audio recordings of academic lectures, seminars and discussions, and they're often simply incomprehensible, because speakers will stop speaking mid-sentence if they get a strong agreeing/disagreeing vibe from their audience - either because they can tell their audience knows what they're going to say next, or because they're imagining a rebuttal from the expressions on the faces of the listeners and they correct themselves to take that into account. Even beyond that kind of thing, though, I think most lecturers, unless they're just reading from a piece of paper (in which case, put the text up on the Web), will be responding to the particular ebbs and flows of energy in a specific room full of specific students at a specific time.
For me the usefulness of lectures, specifically, as a mode of learning, was actually always much more about the discipline of having to be in a particular place at a particular time, and about the collective experience of listening with other people. I think if you're accessing stuff remotely, it's much more useful to have text-based information, or maybe a 'read' lecture with Powerpoint for people who take in information more easily aurally.
Speaking to address people you can't see, who'll be listening to you in a different place, at a different time, is a different skill from lecturing to a room full of people. (I say this because one of the lecturers at my last uni, who was usually quite a successful speaker, once recorded his lecture onto DVD because he was going to be away, and it was atrocious).
That's really negative, huh. But I guess I mean - and I'm sure you know this, otherwise you wouldn't be asking this question in the first place - that the technology changes the event, and you have to be thinking about what are the best ways to learn remotely, rather than just finding a technical way to transmit modes of learning that work face-to-face. The remote learners will miss out on those types of teaching and learning, but hopefully they'll make up for it by having access to other types of learning which don't work face-to-face (discussion forums being a prime example). |
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