I think it is very interesting that we live in a time where there is now such a massive amount of useful information available online. When I first started using the internet frequently in the late nineties, it was pretty frustrating because there were not a lot of useful websites with good content, and learning materials where hard to come by. Everything was just getting started and a lot of it sucked, websites looked pretty cheesy..
Now it seems you can search for just about anything you want to learn, and in many cases watch high quality video of someone demonstrating how it is done. It is an amazing thing to me, to be able to learn in such a way, especially for someone who is a visual learner. It’s amazing how it has helped me to strengthen my existing knowledge and also helped me to learn new things.
When I was in college I remember many times I wanted to be able to just pause in the moment while the teacher was talking, try something out, and then resume the lecture. I always struggled in school with having to read abstract information, and it seemed everything was abstract to me. I definitely think I would have learned a lot better if my books had been replaced by videos, lol.
One more thing, is that I had a web design teacher once who was super lazy. Instead of giving good lectures, he would spend most of the class time giving us a bunch of websites to look at and learn from. It was weird, it was as though he was making us do all this work so that he didn’t really have to teach or explain anything.
He would always avoid answering questions and just try and get us to look up answers on our own. I can understand learning how to do things yourself, look up your own stuff, but it just seemed he was completely useless most of the time. He would sit at his desk all day and work on his own stuff, basically not teaching anything. I’m thinking to myself, what is the point of paying for this class? I could have just as easily spent a few hours at home myself doing research on how web design is done and saving the money!
When you come across a badly constructed tutorial video or article, you can always look for a better one, with many general topics there are lots of people making videos. If your already paying a school to take a class and you end up with a bad teacher, there is little you can do but bear through it and try your best for a good grade. Now not all teachers are bad, many are brilliant and inspirational. However when you get a bad one, it sucks since your paying for it.
Schools are spending so much time on having teachers who are teaching live and in person, but what if teachers could have recordings of various things to share with the kids, and instead they could talk about it when kids have questions about the video. If more time was spent on generating good educational content I think people could learn better and faster. Some people would call me crazy, what about teachers loosing their jobs?
I think not, the teachers should be paid by the schools to create better video content, it is getting easier and cheaper to produce decent video learning materials. The teachers would still be interacting with their students when they watch the videos together, pausing and discussing as needed. I think in some ways this could make the teachers job more fun and they are getting to share their creative work in making the video with their students.
Now I haven’t been in a classroom for a little while, thank goodness because they kinda creep me out, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that teachers are already bringing cool learning videos they find in to show their students for discussion. You can learn about so much, it truly is like a library on crack. I remember seeing a while back some article talking about how the internets made us dumber. I don’t understand anyone who claims that the internet has made us dumb, I just think it lets us access more information much faster than ever before, so we can learn more if we choose.
