Lectures

I'm a university student, so I have to deal with a lot of lectures. I think that the state of these lectures has severely gone downhill ever since the pandemic in 2020. It's hard to pin-point exactly what is wrong with them, but to me, it seems that many students lack motivation to participate in class. This is often regardless of modality. In one of my online classes, for example, the professor only receives participation in the beginning of class, when he takes attendance. Once the lecture starts, it's almost like he assumes no one else is going to speak. He just keeps talking and asks rhetorical questions out of habit.

Lectures have probably always had this problem - the pandemic only exacerbated it. Students got used to the passivity of being in an online Zoom meeting, where all they had to do was join the meeting to get counted for attendance. After that, you could tune out the lecture. That's what happens in a lot of my in person classes now. People just don't seem to care what the professor is even saying. They only show up because it's part of what they're paying for, and maybe there's a chance that the professor will say something important about the homework.

That's all people really seem to care about. All that matters is the grade that you receive at the end - the proof that you took the class. This may be fair in some cases, like with general education classes. I will say that some of the classes I had to take previously probably didn't matter that much to my degree. But this problem still exists in the higher level classes that I'm taking now. We should be getting knowledge, above all, out of these classes rather than just a letter grade as proof.

I think this problem is a representation of the reprioritization of how students learn. People no longer have to rely on the availability of certain educators and facilities in order to learn skills. The internet enables that sort of information to be available to anyone at all times. This is highly applicable to engineering and computer science, the area of my major. It's probably much different for other disciplines, such as health sciences. Regardless, I think most students still feel this pointlessness when attending class because they could just learn everything the professor is lecturing about on their own. On top of that, this independent learning would be without the mind-numbing power points that so often accompany in-person learning.

The counter point to all of this is that having an assigned professor for different classes helps students find mentors. You can learn everything from the internet, sure, but having a professional there to condense that information for you can be far more helpful. I certainly wouldn't have learned everything I needed to design this website without a professor to guide me.

The internet is a well of infinite information, but every single piece is scattered everywhere. It takes an expert to find all of the disparate parts and put them together to make something useful.