
Online lectures are actually a really good idea and I’m glad they’re sticking around
It’ll mean there’s more time for small class teaching
It’s 08:45am on a Monday morning. You’re hanging out your arse because a chilled pub quiz spiralled into a VK-fuelled night out that culminated with a depressing kebab at 5am. And now you’ve got 15 minutes to get into uni just to sweat through an hour of a lecturer reading words nicked from a book they defo didn’t write. What if this didn’t have to happen? What if we lived in a world where lectures were online and recorded. Oh, wait. We do. I’m here to tell you why that’s a really good thing.
Lectures being online and recorded mean that when there’s a gorilla smashing two cymbals together in your head and a fuck tonne of stomach acid tearing up your insides, you don’t have to walk to a big room to be told the difference between a spondee and a dactyl (I don’t know what they are, I just remember they’re something to do with poetry).
Instead, you can ride the wave, go back to sleep and three Beroccas later, get down to that poetry lecture, by watching it on your computer whenever you want. Recorded online lectures give greater flexibility and mean you can study at your own pace. Fuck it. Maybe that’s 2x speed.
And if you want to ask questions, you can just ask them in the chat or in one of the 53 online forums your uni has launched since the start of the pandemic. Heck, why not try an email.
Not only do online lectures give you greater flexibility, they could potentially stop the criminal wastage of lecturers’ time. A lecturer could record their class at home, cutting their transport time, and only do it once, rather than having to perform the same thing over an over again. Obvs things change within subjects, but these lectures could very easily be updated rather being tediously rehashed over and over again.
And not only are online lectures more flexible, but they’re more accessible too. If you’re living with a physical disability, it could be really inconvenient to get to a lecture theatre, just to listen to something you could have read or listened to at home.
Equally, if you’re an international student and have gone home to visit your family and are stuck their due to some poxy virus or something, an online lecture that’s recorded would 100 per cent save your bacon.
And what could we do with all this freed up time? More small class teaching. With staff less stretched to put on lectures all the time, there’ll be more opportunity for seminars and maybe even a one-to-one tutorial or two. Because let’s be realistic. That’s the good shit.
Featured image: Credit: Joyseulay/ Shutterstock
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