If USC wants to step up its game and jump in college rankings, it needs to ditch any and all classes driven by recorded lectures.
In this day and age of the Internet and its free flow of information, USC can’t afford to relegate a well-spoken lecture, live and in person, to a digital format, especially those that can’t compete with the likes of the already popular Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare: highly touted and well-reviewed resources that don’t cost viewers a dime.
You caught that, right? About no costs? Khan Academy and MIT’s OpenCourseWare are absolutely free.
With all the press it’s gotten, it almost goes without saying that Khan Academy’s material is on point. Have a calculus test on partial derivatives, gradients and divergences that you’re fuzzy on with no time to attend an SI session? Hop on Khan Academy for a great refresher on material that you’d otherwise be stuck trying to make sense of with your notes and lonesome self. The text is concise and to the point, and the videos are engaging and intelligently narrated. The production quality is at a level that far exceeds the antiquated video lectures some of us are forced to endure here at USC. Furthermore, Khan Academy’s subject material is not limited to mathematics, but includes science, economics, humanities and computer programming, too.
But wait, the power of the Internet is not too good to be true, because it arguably gets better.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare provides video lectures encompassing an entire course’s material for free! MIT’s quality lectures, on subjects ranging from aeronautics to economics, are all a click away. You may not get the nominal credits for watching them, but you will get the education. Some of the lectures, particularly the physics-related ones, are so valued that they’ve become minor YouTube hits. A couple of MIT professor Walter Lewin’s lectures have over a million views. You can’t argue with those numbers.
With such great resources available online and for free, no one wants to feel like they’re paying tuition to teach themselves with incredibly suboptimal material.
For many students, paying tuition is half the challenge of college, and for them to not get their money’s worth out of their hard work is a disrespect to their dedication to getting an education.
Give the students what their tuition has earned them: the expertise of their professors displayed live and in lecture. Whether the decision to build classes around YouTube video lectures was financially driven or not, it’s a poor use of technology and shows a concerning lack of vision by the administration.
Well-versed and knowledgeable professors will always be the staple of a college education, and USC would be smart to leave the video lectures as a mere supplement to the foundation provided by the classroom or lecture hall.