It's the quality of the Open Yale video lectures that most clearly reveals the cult of the magical sage at work. The video lectures consist purely of the lecturer’s image and speech; in the lectures I viewed, there were no blackboard notes, no slides, no student faces, no student questions. The unstated message is that nothing else besides lecturer image and speech is really necessary or consequential to the learning experience.
In corporate training, the particular blind spot is equating content-learner interaction with learning; instructor-free learning is common, and instructors are often not even considered in the instructional design process. Academia’s blind spot is equating lecturing with learning; more specifically, equating a lecturer's image + speech with learning, as the Open Yale video lectures so clearly illustrate.
Of course, I imagine that the Yale folks would be the first to say that in-person lectures are better because you also have the lecturer’s presence. But this is really only an enhancement of the magical sage-on-the-stage experience -- live performance vs. DVD.
As for the lectures themselves, the actual video quality is good, but the video technique itself was at least 40 years behind current practice, consisting of an unremitting focus on the lecturer’s image and speech in the lectures which I sampled. For starters, I selected a lecture at random from the featured course in philosophy and watched it for awhile. I lasted about four minutes -- the concept of the “p-functioning body” was just too abstract for me, and I found myself more interested in seeing what body position the lecturer would adopt next as he sat on this desk -- his sneakers were especially visually distracting -- such was the paucity of available visual information.
Next, a commenter on the Chronicle article (comment #10) who "found it annoying that many of the presenters are using powerpoints or other materials that the new audience cannot see" prompted me to confirm this observation. Sure enough, in the very next video lecture I looked at in the Intro Psych course, within the first minute the lecturer looked up at least six times to a blackboard with notes that the viewer never gets to see (at least as far as I know; I wasn't going to waste an additional 20-30 minutes to find out). I paused the lecture at an appropriate tableau: a frame which shows the back of the lecturer’s head looking up at notes which I will never get to see.
One might say that these are unfair samples taken out of context. My reply is that the result of this video approach is something worse than even the traditional lecture. As with all reductive applications of technology, this one makes its parent look good. At least during a classroom lecture I could stare out the window, daydream, engage in people-watching my classmates, etc. Maybe ask a question or two if I was lucky. But for some reason, the act of watching a video lecture on a computer compels me to pay attention to it, focused on what was unfortunately a poorly organized information environment -- not only stripped of what makes in-person lectures worthwhile, but also of any production values which would make watching these lectures more worthwhile.
And of course, the traditional lecture can be improved upon by fundamentally altering the method (e.g., using video clips instead of one single shot, uninterrupted performance) or by augmenting it (e.g., guest speakers, multimedia). I didn't stick around long enough to find out whether these lectures were augmented in any way since the video lectures themselves are not searchable (although Open Yale does provide transcripts which apparently are mostly but not entirely complete).
There is only one context in which this approach makes sense: a belief in the power of the magical sage whose visage and speech alone are enough to produce a learning experience. How else to explain why the Open Yale video lectures strip everything else out of the learning experience?
(More thoughts on this in next post .)
