[LINK] CWA urges action on data drought

[Tom Worthington]

On 24/04/16 09:15, David Boxall wrote:

> Indeed, but Australia is a different universe. Course materials expand
> to exploit anticipated resources ...

Course designers should be trained to design on-line materials for the 
available bandwidth. However, this is not well covered in current 
courses, at least not the ones I have done.

> Video and audio are generally poor teaching media. Of course, so are
> lectures. ...

Yes, live lectures and video are not significantly better than text 
based materials for student learning.

The realization that talking at them does not really help your students 
learn is confronting for a teacher. I had this epiphany and gave my last 
"lecture" in 2008: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2008/08/my-last-lecture.html

Students *like* seeing their teacher and they *like* videos, so it is 
useful to have some, but the education system should not invest too much 
in this. It can be as little as a still photo of the teacher on the 
course web page and a few minutes of video each week.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, College of 
Engineering & Computer Science, Australian National University
http://people.cecs.anu.edu.au/user/3890 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4799-8464