Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture when I'm going for a run. Sometimes I like to listen while I'm doing chores. Seems presumptuous to say I'm "not taking the course" when we know that learning styles vary so much between individuals.
YouTube has a ton of lectures, for free, that you can view and/or listen to in this manner.
But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve with remote learning, and isn't the use case they should be catering to.
It baffles me that people expect to take a process optimized for a neurotypical 20-year-old subsidized enough to devote 100% time to study and apply it to everybody else on the planet. I get how physical universities ended up the way they did. But software is infinitely soft and the internet is basically everywhere. Insisting that everybody must learn the same way a bunch of well-off youth did in 1950 is grossly exclusionary and wasteful.
In short, I don't care what the universities are trying to achieve with remote learning. I care what the students succeed in achieving. Let's focus on that.
No one is saying "everyone must learn the same way". They are teaching a specific way, and are under no obligation to ensure that "your" unique needs are met.
I mean, you say yourself there's no single concept of how students learn. So maybe explain how you'd expect them to to do it?
There are all kinds of models out there. Udemy, Coursera, good old recorded lectures on YouTube. Find what works for you and use it.
They are trying to exclude large swathes of the population?
It is extremely common for people with ADD to focus better when they keep the part of their brain that distracts them busy. In college I folded origami in lectures so that my brain wouldn't go off on tangents that would lead to me tuning out significant sections of the lecture.
Some people combat the tangents by being busy, and some people embrace the tangents (which can be valuable for understanding) by listening to lectures multiple times.
They should cater to those people as opposed to other people for whom bite-sized learning works better? When did we become a society that expects everyone else to cater to our specific needs? No one is being "excluded".
If that's the way you need to learn, fantastic. There are options out there for you. It wasn't that long ago when none of this existed.
I didn't say that. The claim was made that learning in this method is incompatible with taking a college level course. I was demonstrating how that attitude is both blatantly false and exclusionary.
> When did we become a society that expects everyone else to cater to our specific needs?
The value of accessibility and inclusivity in education has long been recognized. Why does online learning get a pass from considering this?
Edit: There is no problem with one person saying "I learn better this way" and someone else saying ”I learn better this other way". The problem is when people say "the way you learn is inferior and not suited to college level material" because that is exclusionary.
It won't work for a calculus lecture, but for a lot of topics it works just fine.
It seems, but it isn't. The inflexible way they structure their courses is just a failure to accommodate to different learning styles. And it's okay - they don't need to be everything for everyone - but it's disappointing.
