20 reasons why Stanford Prof thinks video lectures self-evidently better

“The lecture video delivers me in a way the student has complete control over, making it self-evidently better.” Says Stanford’s Professor of Mathematics Keith Devlin. He’s a MOOC veteran, who delivers Stanford’s ‘Introduction to Mathematical Thinking’ on Coursera. We have to understand is why this is so. What makes a recorded lecture ‘self-evidently better’. 

This was confirmed by a friend of mine who went back to do a Masters Degree at the LSE and found that he's questioning going to lectures at all, as the recorded versions are better. He can take detailed notes, reflect more and generally watches most of them at x 1.25 speed. His argument is that recorded lectures are therefore better than live lectures. When I presented these and the following arguments at a technology in Higher Education conference back in the day, I had people walk out on me.... still one of my proudest moneys as a speaker, and at 28,000 views the YouTube version proved my point. Quite apart from the many pedagogic arguments about lectures full stop - one that they are too long (actually arbitrarily long, as they're only an hour because the Sumerians had a base-6 number system), and passive, there are plenty of other arguments for recorded lectures.

So what are the advantages of recorded lectures?

1. Available 24/7

2. Rewind if your attention drops

3. Rewind if you didn’t understand

4. Rewind if English is your second language

5. Pause if you want to look something up

6. Access to vast online resources on same device 

7. Pause to take good notes 

8. Fast forward (even 1.25 speed), if known or irrelevant 

9. Watch several times for increased retention

10. Watch when in right attentive state for learning

11. Watch if you have been ill

12. Watch for revision as exam approaches

13. Not wasting time travelling to and from lecture

14. Academic can focus on tutoring and feedback

15. Multiple uses in courses, MOOCs etc.

16. Data gathered on who, what, when watched

17. Can be subtitled for the deaf

18. Can be translated and subtitled

19. Can be delivered online at almost no cost

20. Can be viewed on many devices

Devlin’s refreshingly honest and revealing article on teaching online goes on to explain that there are deeper pedagogic advantages.

Better than regular classes

Devlin thinks that students “get a version of that close, one-on-one instruction that they absolutely do not get in a regular class of any size”. He notes that many students feel intimidated in speaking back to academics as they have “insufficient confidence” and thinks that “there is good reason to believe that human connection through social media may be enough to have whatever effect is provided by the real thing”. In truth, he thinks that requested feedback could be provided, where necessary, and, in fact “shy students can perform much better in an online environment”.

Closer connection

As Devlin explains, counter-intuitively, “The fact is, a student taking my MOOC can make a closer connection with me than if they were in a class of more than 25 or so students, and certainly more than in a class of 250.”  He reminds us of a fact often ignored in the debate, that “in a large class, the student is not going to get my individual attention, so there is no loss there in learning in a MOOC, so a MOOC seems to offer more of me than a student would get in a regular, large class”.

Intimacy

Interestingly, Devlin designed the course and the style of presentation around this sense of intimacy. “I set out to create that same sense of the student sitting alongside me, one-on-one. If you can pull it off, it’s powerful. In particular, if you can create that feeling of intimate human connection, the student will overlook a lot of imperfections and problems.”

Conclusion

Time and time again (not always) I have experienced, and heard from other MOOCers, about the intimacy of the academic teaching in MOOCs. I first came across it in the Thrun AI course and for me it is the hallmark of a good course. Devlin is a reflective teacher, who waited until he had gone through the experience of teaching a MOOC before making these observations. His full article can be found here.

10 ways online learning could make you a BETTER TEACHER

Time and time again, when dealing with teachers and academics, who have been seriously involved in online learning, I have found that they gained enormously from the experience. They become better teachers.

1. Makes teaching visible

Every professional can benefit from deeper reflection on their skills and practices. Participation in the design, development and delivery of an online experience will broaden and deepen the process of reflection. This not only leads to better performance but to the acquisition of new teaching skills. This is an example of what John Hattie called Visible learning, when teachers make things ‘visible’ to enhance their role through the evaluation of their own teaching. Hattie thinks that Visible Learning and Teaching occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and when students, to a degree, become their own teachers. Online encourages a more evidence-based approach to both the profession and process. When you’re at a distance from learners you need to be a better teacher.

2. Crystallises content

Online learning lies naked on the screen, open to scrutiny in a way that is rarely true in the classroom or lecture hall. This forces you to be clear, precise and accurate. It also forces you to consider attention, chunking, elaboration, deliberate practice and other principles in good teaching that you may never previously taken to the wire. Invariably, the design, development and delivery of online content improves the quality of the content. Adaptive systems now even identify weak and erroneous assessment items. When thousands of students got an algebra question wrong on Coursera course, it had to be changed. Content production crystallises learning.

3. Media mix

If you’ve delivered largely chalk and talk in the classroom or lecture hall, you will now have to use text, graphics, diagrams, images, animation, audio and video to deepen understanding. This means cutting your text until it bleeds and lots of other editorial skills around the use of different media You will become more adept at understanding the power of different media in learning and finessing your media mix. See these lists of tips, some counter-intuitive, to understand the sheer range of these new media skills.

4. Free to actually teach

As you sit at more of a distance, it gives you the opportunity, not to be the transmitter of knowledge but more of a facilitator. Free from the task of repeated exposition, you can become a true teacher, attentive to the problems learners have on specific issues. If you doubt this, try it. By automating some of your good teaching practice on the exposition side, you can focus more on the art and practice of teaching. You are suddenly free from the repetitive tasks of repeating the same basic expository content to become a true teacher.

5. Fulsome feedback

For a number of years I have been involved in online degree courses, where the online students never meet their tutors or other students. Yet year after year they outperform their campus colleagues on the levels of degree they attain. This is down to the detailed, structured, archived and frequent dialogue and feedback they receive from their online tutors, who are forced to use online structures. Keith Devlin, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford, and MOOC veteran notes that many students feel intimidated in speaking back to academics as they have “insufficient confidence” and thinks that “there is good reason to believe that human connection through social media may be enough to have whatever effect is provided by the real thing”. In truth, he thinks that “shy students can perform much better in an online environment”.

6. Closer connection

“The fact is, a student taking my MOOC can make a closer connection with me than if they were in a class of more than 25 or so students, and certainly more than in a class of 250” says Keith Devlin. He reminds us, that “in a large class, the student is not going to get my individual attention, so there is no loss there in learning in a MOOC, so a MOOC seems to offer more of me than a student would get in a regular, large class”. Interestingly, Devlin designs his courses and the style of presentation around this sense of intimacy. “I set out to create that same sense of the student sitting alongside me, one-on-one. If you can pull it off, it’s powerful. In particular, if you can create that feeling of intimate human connection, the student will overlook a lot of imperfections and problems.” Far from being a disembodied experience, learners often report intimate and good teaching.

7. Better assessor

Online delivery forces your hand on assessment. You can’t get away with primitive and destructive ‘hands up anyone’ strategies. You often have to identify, and tackle, common student misconceptions, as you have to counter them with concrete strategies. This is particularly true in adaptive courses, where you have to be explicit in the dependencies and networked structure of the knowledge. In addition, online automatically produces data. These analytics allow you to diagnose issues and take action, as a teacher, to improve the motivation and attainment of your learners.

8. Enhanced teaching

Try running a webinar online and you’ll soon learn to acquire skills on the use of the tool, monitor chat and questions, improve your presentation and teaching skills (see some tips here). In Arizona State University’s Biology BIO100 course, Susan Holechek, their most experienced instructor saw attainment rise from 72% in Spring to over 92% in the Fall, using an adaptive learning system, to enhance her teaching, “I think we had the perfect combination of a good system and good teacher” said the subsequent report. It is this combination of good teacher and good tech, in technology-enhanced-teaching, that makes a real difference to even experienced teachers.

9. More relevant

Like it or not technology, especially the internet, is a massively relevant cultural phenomenon. To ignore the online world, as a teacher, is to ignore the reality of changes in the world outside of educational institutions. There has, in my view, been more pedagogic change in last 20 years than last 2000 years, through the use of technology. Technology is more than a tool, it is part of every teacher and student’s life. In terms of relevance alone, it benefits teachers to understand and use what their learners are likely to use in their personal and working lives.

10. Teach more students

A point so often missed is that the online teacher and academic is likely to teach many more students that they would have in classrooms and lecture theatres. A school teacher over a lifetime will only teach a few thousand pupils, a lecturer far fewer. If your profession is to teach, then reaching the minds of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions, is surely a noble goal.

Conclusion

Sure, there’s the intimacy of the classroom and the human side of face-to-face teaching. But rather than being behind closed doors in a classroom or lecture hall, online teaching forces you to become a more visible and, in my view, a better teacher. You hone existing skills, enhance others and learn new teaching methods. That stretches you as a professional.

Ton of tools and 10 things to do if you're new to online learning...

Schools and Universities in several countries have closed down for weeks. But life goes on. Or does it? Do educators simply give up and wait until students come back or do what they should do and switch to safer online teaching and learning?

If you’re faced with this cliff-edge, there are several things you should consider when moving online:

1. Be positive and communicate

See this as an opportunity to expand your skills and don’t go all ‘anti-tech’. Keep yourself and your learners positive. See it as a project, more importantly, see it as a way of doing the best for your students.Communicate this to your learners as they'll be looking to you for reassurance. Grasp the opportunity.
Communicate with your students - ask where they are, what kit they've got, bandwidth... Oh and change your language... Homework – was there ever a worse word for learning? As we switch online let’s also drop ‘online class’… ‘lecture, lecturer’… use the language of the web… message, link, screen-share… 
This will be weird but you really do have to listen to your students. They will have ideas and solve problems...
Don't rush it with pages of links. Build slowly. step-by-step - it's a case of less is more.

 2. It’s been done before

Remember millions of people have learnt and are learning online. Entire degree courses, where the learners graduates without setting foot in a campus or having any face-to-face teaching are now common. I attend graduation ceremonies every year for thousands of such students... and they often outperform their campus-based peers. This means there’s a wealth of techniques and technology that have been tried and tested. If possible contact the professionals in this field run. your organisation. They've thought about this and most probably done it already.

3. Use the platform you have

Your organisation may already have a VLE or LMS, like Moodle or Canvas, that has a ton of functionality that is underused. The advantage of taking this route is that all teachers and students should be registered and delivery and tracking should be easy. You’ll also get some internal support and there’s a large community out there with the same problems. Your school may be using Google or Microsoft tools already… You’ll be surprised how good Google Docs and other tools can be in this situation.

4. Synchronous v asynchronous

Think first about what you want to do in realtime or not in realtime. What can be done asynchronously, like email, NOT in real time and what do you want to take place synchronously, like a webinar, in realtime? My advice would be to use synchronous techniques sparingly. Make asynchronous your default.

5. Synchronous

For synchronous teaching Skype, Zoom (my preference - free Zoom account OK for up to 40 mins and 100 students and doesn't bugger up your computer), Hangouts or other comms tech can be used to deliver lectures, webinars or teaching sessions. You can do this showing your face but also switch the video off to use audio as you screenshare your slides, documents etc. One of the advantages here is that you can also link out to other online resources. Remember that you can also take questions and encourage discussion, create groups discussions, breakout groups and so on, with such systems. Your sessions can also be recorded for revision access. It’s good to acquire these skills.
PS

Single biggest mistake in learning using Zoom, Skype etc- the idea that the image of a talking head is always useful.... which is why Khan and others got rid of it in their content... if I'm learning math, I want to see the maths... SCREENSHARE, SHOW, WORKED EXAMPLES... open, close and perhaps  for a little reflection or debate in middle...

6. Asynchronous

Of course, you needn’t use video or live face-to-face events at all. If you don’t want to do live lectures online, you can always record them in PowerPoint (yes folks it's easy in PPT and save as MP4) Zoom or Skype. Your institution may have your already recorded lectures from last year. Keep them short and simple (research has shown that 6 mins chunks is a good limit). If not, find a way. If need be... record on your laptop or mobile.

Use email, or other social media platforms to communicate with students. Consider the plethora of other tools available – chat, messaging and so on. Remember that’s where they hang out – all of the time! Reading materials – easy but also consider other online resources such as YouTube videos, podcasts and open source online learning content – there’s a ton of good stuff out there. Don’t get hung up on trying to create ALL content yourself. There’s Khan Academy for maths and tons of other free stuff. This should improve your curated content for future classes. For quick content you can use the likes if WildFire (AI creates the content).If you workmen a school try the excellent Khan Academy.

7. Homework and assignments

First things first. Your students will already have or expect homework and assignments. Keep this going and make them an integral part of your online plan. In a sense, you can sell online learning as on-going, supervised homework! But set deadlines for students to return work to you online and be clear, REALLY CLEAR about the expected output. Qualtify 'xxxx words' and give clear deadline 2pm the 3rd March. Specify media types and file type. You may want to experiment by asking students for audio or video outputs. Don't get too ambitious with group work. Some will not do it.

8. Feedback

This is a real opportunity to up your game on effective and regular feedback. Use well-established, high retention techniques like retrieval practice and spaced practice. Things that are easier to do online. Use this opportunity to be more innovative. For example, with spaced practice start every new session with a recap of the last session and end with a recap of what you’ve just done. Interleave content.

9. Assessment

Don't be too ambitious with this. Keep to a low-stakes assessment schedule. You may have trouble getting students to stick to your plans and schedule, so use a series of formative (not summative) assessments to keep them on track. This will allow you to spot those who are struggling and provide more help.

10. Continuity

Keep up momentum. Have a schedule. Stick to that schedule. They will respond if you respond. If something doesn’t work, try something else, something simpler. Don’t be too ambitious with the tech. Keep it simple. Above all keep up regular comms with students, without flooding them. Give them time to complete tasks, generate their own work. Ask for their help. They may just be more online savvy than you think. And thank them – regularly!

Conclusion

Don’t panic. See this as an opportunity. You may find that you get a closer relationship with your students. Things will go wrong – that’s tech –like uncooked spaghetti, it tends not to bend but break. Not a problem. There’s always an alternative. Good luck.

Resources:

Great list of tools from Stephen Downes

Great advice from Tony Bates

Great in-depth advice from Stanford

Stanford’s Professor of Mathematics Keith Devlin explains why online may be good for you as a teacher

Zoom offers video tool to schools free. Once verified, Zoom will remove 40-min limit for Basic accounts. Currently available for schools in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Poland, Romania, South Korea and the United States....register here

https://bit.ly/33hgYA2

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