There’s an interesting discussion going on right now on Slashdot about college podcasts and webcasts. Some of the highly rated comments:

If a kid chooses to not attend class but still listens to all the professors lectures, why prevent him from doing so? He is learning the material, no different from attending the class.

As long as he is learning, I see no reason why you should try and hide lectures from kids who choose to learn in a different way. (audio as opposed to sitting through class) Listening to all of them the day before an exam is no different from cramming the night before.

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I can think of a few possible reasons that might go through instructors’ minds:

It would be very difficult and/or painful to try to fully test students on every detail you’d like them to know after taking a course. So having them there in person adds two ways to build the instructor’s confidence in the student’s knowledge:

• Knowing that the student is physically present and maybe even listening to the lecture/discussion makes it a little more likely that the student learns that day’s course material than if the student simply played frisbee on the quad.
• Especially in smaller classes, the instructor can gauge the student’s level of knowledge based on how he handles class discussions.

In some classes it can be valuable to have input from many students during a class discussion. This is sometimes true in technical courses, but perhaps more often true for hippie touchy feely liberal arts courses where no one is wrong and diversity is valued.

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In my day, we had to walk through 6ft of snow and sit on stone benches in unheated lecture theatres. We wrote with goose-quill pens and had to keep ink bottles under our clothing to stop it from freezing. We did all our calculations with tables & slide rules. Ever since calculators and ball-point pens came in, students are getting soft. Half the reason to come to university is to build the moral fibre needed to be a a leader in industry. We had to sit through lectures and so should the kids of today….. blaah, blaah blaah.

That’s basically what this all boils down to.

Which brings me to a blog I stumbled upon just a couple of days ago. Here is Obadiah Tarzan Greenberg’s blog. He’s in charge of webcast.berkeley.edu, where all of UC Berkeley’s webcasts and podcasts are available. He also has a lot of cool blog posts like: 10 ideas for using blogs in higher-ed PR, On coursecasting and attendance issues…, and Spotlight on Berkeley audio/video. Check his blog for more, if you’re interested. Or even if you just want to say thanks to the guy who makes sleeping in past your 8 o’clock class possible…