The Online Classroom

One of my professors has been playing around with the concept of the online classroom. Video lectures are provided before the class, in which students are expected to watch and come to the class with questions. All the class sessions are also recorded as well and posted later for anyone who may have missed class or those who are not physically in Pittsburgh but interested in the lecture content.

It's been an interesting experience to say the least in the "flipped classroom" question where the students ask the questions. My professor has a tendency to ask questions to everyone in the class while he lectures to ensure everyone is following along (where he also randomly selects people). This is perhaps the biggest loss since we have gone from an actual lecture to an online classroom. The general check-up questions he asks are automatically assumed that we have learnt from the video lecture. The video lecture also gives students the advantage of re-watching the lecture several times to catch these details. But even then, the questions asked by the professor test if the fundamental basics are even understood. That is to say, without the foundation, everything else is lost...

The big advantage though, it that for what questions are asked, become a thorough, in-depth discussion. The can go much farther and beyond the scope of the course, and may sometimes to be tied to some people's research a little bit, providing more beneficial information, or just satisfy people's curiosity (and as graduate students, we have a lot of curiosity). But at the same time, these questions may appear off-topic from the class, or complete tangents of unnecessary information for the rest of us. Establishing the right type of questions, seems to be a difficult thing to determine.

I've talked with the professor a little to understand his expectations as well. And he presents the interesting point that he thought graduate students would picked up on the situation better than undergraduates (he's also attempted this previously for another class). Graduate students are much more accustomed to self-learning. This may be reading journal papers to implement understand a new technique, or referring to a textbook to teach themselves something they're not familiar with but plays a major part of their research.

To which I'm guilty for not going above and beyond in my learning... I guess that's a sign to go back to work.