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Kaj_Sotala comments on Starting University Advice Repository - Less Wrong
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For pure lectures (no real discussion, just the lecturer speaking for a long time) in courses where there are good written materials covering the same content and presence at the lectures is not required, don't bother going to the lectures if they don't feel obviously valuable. Self-study from the written materials is likely to be a more effective use of your time; lectures are generally a terrible format.
I used to think this, but I now suspect that this is mostly just for "our kind." The failure of online education to replace traditional lectures might be because typical college students gets something significant out of live performances. It's also probably related to why video conferencing hasn't replaced live conferences.
It's my impression (moderate confidence; have only skimmed a bit of the research here but that's the impression I came away with, see e.g. the link in my earlier comment) that "lectures are terrible" is the general consensus of education research.
Isn't "education research" the standard example of cargo cult science?
I think a big reason people are uninterested in video conferencing is the fact that eye contact does not work correctly (if you look at the other person's face, the other person does not see you looking at them.)
I might agree with your rationale, but not with following the conclusion. It can be very important to attend lectures in order to hear about most likely topics that will be on tests, any possible changes in test or project details and deadlines, to keep good rapport with the professor (so you aren't one of those "students who never show up to class"), and to keep yourself focused on following the material at the rate from which you will be tested on it.
This may also vary by University and professor since some may care more about attendence and some are better than others at emailing information about test and project changes to students rather than just announcing it in class.
Probably. There have been a couple of courses where I'd probably done better on tests if I'd attended the lectures, but these have been rare exceptions. For the most part, skipping the lectures has only been beneficial, and I'm far from the only student who has found this to be the case.
I also never got the impression that most professors particularly cared about lecture attendance, if they were pure lectures. Classes that involved actual discussion are different, of course. (There's probably a correlation with the fact that in order to have useful discussion in a class, the class size can't be too large, so pure lectures tended to be mass lectures where the professors were unlikely to notice your presence or absence anyway.)
I don't care about attendance, University isn't high school, it's not a prison.