Setting Trends

”I asked about lectures, not lecture slides. Will there be lectures on the course website as well?”

At the start of the autumn semester I received an e-mail from a student who planned to enroll for one of the courses I teach in the spring. Most of the questions were course-related — things I had answered many times before. My standard answer is that any slides used in a lecture are posted on the course website. But this response introduced a newcomer to the teaching-learning experience. No, I lecture to students, not to cameras, hence there will be no lectures on the website.

End of conversation.

Since the e-mail from the prospective student, the growing Mooc (massive open on-line course) trend has been one of several coffee-break topics with colleagues from various areas of science and engineering. Some see no problem whatever. From them I hear, ”This is just a new technology platform that will make our distance-learning courses even better!”, or ”Wow! Let's just put a camera at the back of the room and film the thing, and I'll never have to give that lecture on hybrid molecular orbitals again!”, or ”Think of the money we can save on laboratory instruction

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