I just listened to 20 minutes of lecture in about 15 minutes of real time, and I had an epiphany: the conventional college lecture is now dead to me. It's still shuffling around a little, but believe me it's dead. Here are some advantages of moving the lectures proper to online video and holding just the discussion/help sessions in person:
The ability to tempo shift. Holy hell this is awesome. I've had terribly boring classes that actually would have been tolerable if only they had been conducted at roughly twice the speed, and even more interesting classes would have been much improved by an extra 50% more speed, preferably along with the ability to continuously vary the amount of tempo shift. The key here is that the lecture goes fast enough to keep your brain turned on; few things are more demoralizing than helplessly wishing you could fall asleep in class.
If the lectures include (say) PDF slides with timing information to synchronize them with the video, things get even better. You can stick in links to web pages, or you can jump around to relevant sections in the video, and generally just have a grand nonlinear time. It's the Wikipedia effect: chasing interesting information around the vast space of human knowledge is a profoundly effective way of learning.
The marginal costs of making the lectures available publicly are tiny. The rising tide of access to education is guaranteed to uplift humanity as a whole, even if Joe Average doesn't notice.
Good lecturers can drive out bad ones. Who hasn't sat in a boring lecture that was taught better by someone else? That's only necessary because class sizes are traditionally limited by the number of warm bodies you can cram into one room.
The learning is available whenever you want it. That flexibility also means that nobody is riding your ass to get you to keep up with your studying, but I'm sure that that service can be provided separately.
By the way, does anybody know a good source of interesting audio lectures with RSS feeds that I can give to PodShifter? I've been looking around iTunes University, and they've got a lot of good stuff, but trying to get an RSS URL from them is like trying to tape weasels to a wall: so irritatingly difficult that you start to wonder why you even tried. The pedagogical revolution needs to get easier, comrades!
No, I don't mean that the news media are biased politically. I mean that authors are biased by the media they use.
I'm learning about support vector machines (SVMs). There are a lot of books and articles written on SVMs. There are also a whole lot of video lectures on SVMs at videolectures.net (see "kernel methods").
People go into much greater detail in lectures than in text. I like to work with text. I'd like to have a text on SVMs that goes into as much detail as videos on SVMs usually do, and works out the ideas behind the concepts as thoroughly, but no such text exists. For some reason, giving a 5-hour lecture series in which you describe the motivations, applications, and work out the mathematical details is acceptable; but writing a text of the same level of detail, which might take only 2 hours to read, is not.
Perhaps this is because writers are motivated to keep pagecounts low. But pagecount no longer matters with electronic articles. Yet writers still don't want to explain things thoroughly. They certainly aren't saving their readers any time by leaving out intermediate steps. A longer article would take less time to read (and possibly less time to write). Another problem with the pagecount theory is that texts routinely include footnotes and appendices, contributing to the pagecount; yet relegate them to the back of the book, as if embarassed of them, despite the fact that this makes them very difficult to use.
It's especially bad in math, in which writers have a long tradition of deliberately concealing difficult steps and leaving them "as an exercise to the reader". For some reason it is considered bad form to write out all of the steps in a proof, even if adding one or two lines could save the reader five minutes of puzzling. I read an electronic article yesterday where the author said, "These two equations are actually equivalent. Do you see why?"
I think people have adopted a set of cultural biases about what is appropriate in lectures vs. in writing by simply counting observations, without thinking about the systematic sample bias. Speakers speak the way they've seen other speakers speak, without recollecting that most of those speakers were instructors. Technical writers, meanwhile, are picking up their cues from authors of textbooks, which are written with the assumption that a person will be on hand to take you through the details; and applying them in situations where no such person will be available.