News: 1611755112

Wait till the student finds out that the writers of many textbooks are dead

Wow it's like necromancy dude ....

> Wait till the student finds out that the writers of many textbooks are dead

To be fair, there's a general expectation that when it comes to teaching, the person giving the lessons is generally contactable without having to resort to a ouija board!

Though it does sound like for this course, there was at least one layer of teaching assistents between the prof and his pupils!

Shortly we will have had over a year of online courses being given. So that should be years 1, 2 & 3 s lectures all recorded and avalable for veiwing. Now just stop paying the lectures, and make the courses cheaper.

Measuring Course work: Use the aproch of one of my lectures in the days when we wrote ink on paper - the thicker the submision the higher the mark.

He didn't read them as even if you skim them you would see your name, and one of my class mates in the the middle of an essay wrote "Professer Wragg you don't read these do you" - no comment.

Students are getting their lectures online, so why do they have to get them from second rate lecturers in second rate universities even though they still have to shell out the same 9 grand that students at the top universities pay for first rate online lectures?

Instead, why can't they all log in to Prof Top Expert's lectures?

In my experience, subject knowledge doesn't correlate very well with teaching ability.

In fact at undergraduate level it seemed to be a positive hindrance in many cases. I was taught 30 years ago at a Russell Group university by some incredibly talented researchers and professors, and learned almost everything from text books instead (not the assigned texts written by the teacher either!). When I later did a post graduate teaching degree, I realised how short-changed I had been by the standard of teaching in my first degree. There was the odd outlier, like the head of faculty professor who was the best teacher I think I've ever come across, but in general the teaching was quite poor regardless of the teacher's level in the academic hierarchy.

My father had a professor who later got the Nobel prize in Chemistry. He said he wasn't a good teacher.....

I think we can agree that there are some excellent lecturers and some not so good. So when I said Prof Top Expert I meant the one who gave the best lectures.

If they are all being delivered online then why should one student shell out the same amount for lectures of lesser quality?

@fishman: My "introduction to Molecular Biology" [1] course was taught by a Nobel Prize Winner who was an excellent teacher. One of the best in my educational career. Correlation does not imply causation, either positive or negative.

[1] This was one of several classes offered to satisfy a "breadth requirement", that is "for folks with no plan on a chemistry or medical degree, bur curious". Class included C.S. students like myself as well as Music and Philosophy majors. A friend who was a MolBio major later went on to work on image recognition for satellite photos. One never knows what bit off the main stream will be useful.

>Students are getting their lectures online, so why do they have to get them from second rate lecturers in second rate universities

A cynical person could suggest that this is why places like MIT / Stanford put all their lectures online for free - even before all the mooc/covid hype.

It isn't going to affect their student demand but why am I paying $$$$ to take CS at Podunk State U when I can watch SICP 6.001 lectures online?

I'm afraid that I too am going to respectfully disagree with your suggestion that second-rate universities have second-rate lecturers giving second-rate teaching, while top universities provide first-rate lectures. My experience having been through a top university is that the lecturers were given posts based entirely on their research ability, not their teaching ability. At the time, none were given any tuition in how to teach (this may have altered), but would often inherit the lecture notes of the previous lecturer. Some lecturers were excellent, some were rubbish.

I sincerely hope that students paying 9 grand a year get better teaching than I did.

Seriously, this is the tech version of Hogwarts. Perhaps Concordia found that the good Prof expired in his comfy chair in front of the fireplace but got up anyway to teach and is now hosting his course from Silicon Heaven.

Back when I started my 6th grade year & met my teachers for the first time, I was amazed at the number of them that had been there so long that they remembered having taught my father. One of those was my history teacher whom appeared so old & fossilized that he didn't have to take education classes to teach him history because he had *lived through it*. I swear that man made Yoda look like a suckling babe.

Anyway, this teacher would often take role call, have one of us students start a film, & promptly fall asleep. We'd have to turn the volume up loud enough to be heard over his snoring. We'd make fun of the fact that he often drooled in his sleep, but that didn't stop us from having to watch the bloody films since the old bastard gave tests on the material.

When my father found out that my history teacher was the same one that he had had back when he was in school, he was flabbergasted. "No fucking way! That man was older than dirt back then. He must be a fucking MUMMY by now!"

My dad came to parent-teacher night & my history teacher nearly came unglued. "Oh holy crap. $Shadow, this is your dad? No WONDER the last name sounded familiar!"

In the Summer before my own son was due to start at the same school, said history teacher finally passed away. It was a common joke that he'd BEEN dead for centuries, he just had forgotten to fall out of his chair to tip anyone off.

Undead teachers are nothing new, in fact they may be older than you think. =-)p

One of my favourite teachers had been teaching at the same school for 35 years - so was now teaching

the grandchildren of some of his first students when he sadly died at age 59. He'd also taught a celebrity and regarded him as "a jumped up little sh*t" even as he was well known on TV on both sides of the Atlantic.

My Dad was a teacher: one of his early colleagues was similar - in a village school, she'd have paretnts turn up to parents evenings and sit quaking in their seats. "Yes, Mrs. Finding, no, Mrs. Finding" as she told them about how well or badly their children were doing.

If memory serves...

Whilst doing a bachelor's degree by distance education many years ago, one of the course packages (course notes and cassette tapes) had been prepared a couple of years earlier by a professor who had subsequently died. (Not of old age. Possibly cancer?)

The course-work was still current, so if it ain't broke don't fix it. And the course was administered by another lecturer.

Producing a distance learning package, e.g. the OU courses, there'll be a lead time to get the course material together. It'll then be expected to run for several years before being scheduled for replacement. There'll be some amount of probability that one of the authors will die or at least retire before the course EOL arrives. A traditional University course is a live event. A distance learning course is a product; it may have to outlive one of its originators.

Yes, but the OU lecturers still wear 'Kipper' ties and flared trousers and have bushy sideburns, so that you cannot tell whether it was recorded in the 1960's or 2010's.

The future is weird.

When I was in college, we were told about 2 weeks before classes started one semester that our instructor had passed away. The replacement, despite being a full professor, was a total pushover. "How's the homework going?" she'd ask. Everybody would complain and ask for more time - so she'd give us a couple more days. By the end of the semester, we were a couple weeks behind.

In the meantime, I was doing the homework on **NEXT** week's lecture topic during this week's lecture. The course was really that easy.

In college you are supposed to be mature enough that you can take some responsibility. You did, your fellow students didn't.