Online Lecture Content

A lot of us have been talking about providing online lectures and tutorials to students in our classes. I am going ahead with a limited version of this in my classes this year. Thinking about doing this and looking at the technology aspects has stimulated a lot of thought. Stephen Kinsella has written a lot about his experiences in UL, and has been advocating an idea where students would get the lectures up front as a podcast and the class then could be used to really probe ideas and generate discussion.

In thinking about how to do this, I think a lot of us go with the default option of thinking about something cheap and downloadable that can be used quickly on any computer. I have been working with Camtasia for the Mac (also on PC) and I have found it to be absolutely brilliant. Various people have been giving me tips about how to get it working fully but even the very basic recording is useable. Many readers will know the UCLA STATA tutorials, which are excellent, and recorded using Camtasia.  Another option though is to think of something with much higher production values. Michael Sandel's course at Harvard is still, for me, the best example of making lectures available online that I have seen. I don't know how much Harvard paid for the production but this doesn't look cheap. There is, at least, a professional cameraperson and a very high quality camera and a lot of website development. It is probably possible to do these things that well without much cost but it is worth remembering that thousands of people will be downloading and using these videos for several years so if quality can be improved by spending some money, the default option shouldn't be always that we try to do these things for free.

Again, this is one of those issues that gets people emotional. I have talked to colleagues and some students who believe that online content is the beginning of the end for traditional university education and an ominous development. As I have said here a few times I am a complete optimist for this technology both in terms of the massive expansion in access to quality learning that it opens up but also in terms of how it benefits me personally as a professional. It really is frustrating when half of your interactions with students are made up of very routine things that could be handled more effectively for both parties by directing them to a site. Secondly, it is frustrating for students to try to keep up with technical material that really is not meant to be digested in an hour. When I was watching the NBER videos of Imbens lately, I realised how much better it was to be able to stop the video when you wanted to digest a point or play with some notes. This just simply has to be a better way of learning technical material than a live presentation. Does this mean that Imbens becomes obsolete? No, completely the opposite - it means he has a much bigger audience of people that understand him and also that he can give more lectures about innovative things that he is deeply interested in and less lectures previewing standard material that everyone should know. It also augments standard courses given all round the world in a very effective way.

For me, this is the first year I am really going to try and work with this technology in my courses so I will post a bit on how things are going. More generally, I think figuring out how this technology fits with our careers is a useful thing for anyone in research and teaching to think about.