Digital Lectures Focuses Student Attendions

Being able to sit and take notes from a lecture on the tube is way better then having to sit in a huge auditorium along with hundreds of noisy and uninterested students that want and need to be elsewhere. For anyone that experienced this nonsense, as I have, being able to listen to someone lecture directly to you, even though it's on closed circuit TV, is a far better learning experience.

Virtual Blending of Education
Source: Salman Khan, "The Founder of Khan Academy on How to Blend the Virtual with the Physical," Scientific American, July 18, 2013.
July 25, 2013

Whenever people imagine virtual anything, they immediately pit it against its physical counterpart. Amazon versus physical book stores, Wikipedia versus physical encyclopedias. They assume that the virtual will replace the physical with something cheaper, faster and more efficient.

In education, however, the virtual will create a very different type of disruption. We should not aim to replace the physical classroom. Instead, we have an opportunity to blend the virtual with the physical and reimagine education entirely, says Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a not-for-profit educational organization for online learning based in Mountain View, Calif.

Today students in most classrooms sit, listen and take notes while a professor lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 human beings in the room, there is little to no human interaction.

• Exams often offer the first opportunity for the professor to get real information on how well the students digested the knowledge.
• If the test identifies gaps in students' understanding of a basic concept, the class still moves on to a more advanced concept.

Virtual tools are providing an opportunity to rethink this methodology. If a lecture is available online, class time can be freed for discussion, peer tutoring or professor-led exploration.

• If a lecture is removed from class time and we have on-demand adaptive exercises and diagnostics, there is no need to continue the factory model inherited from 19th-century Prussia -- where students are pushed together at a set tempo.
• Instead students can progress at their own pace and continue to prove their knowledge long after the formal course is over.

Over the next 10 to 20 years, blended learning will also allow us to decouple credentials from learning -- today both these functions are done by the same institutions. This approach will allow anyone to prove that they have mastered a set of skills at a high level, whether they learned them on the job, at a physical school, through an online resource or, most likely, all of the above.