[CharlesWayneCT]

It would be better if they had filmed the classes and provided the video.

However, that might give too many people ideas. Why do we spend so much money re-teaching the same courses over and over again, year after year.

Can you imagine doing software that way? re-writing the same code every time you want to accomplish a task again?

Why can't we find the best teacher in the country for each subject class, have them film the perfect class lecture series, and just show them in the classes.

You'd still have teachers in the class to answer questions and to expound on the information, but you'd know the material was being conveyed by an expert, and you could probably get by with fewer teachers. For example, a teacher could take two classes, with the tapes taking up half of each class, while the teacher came in for the other half -- doubling class sizes without decreasing the per-teacher ratio.

Of course, you would never get away with this. In fact, teachers are using more and more online and taped material in classes, but without decreasing the number of teachers OR their pay, even though they are doing less work as they rely more and more on the programmed material.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I did take a video course on "Digital Signal Processing" given by Oppenheim (of MIT). It was OK. The 70's haircut was a little distracting.

Human being react differently to other human beings than to a video and a lecturer acts differently when being filmed.

Also, a good lecturer gets feedback and can tell when he's getting through and when he's not.

I had an absolutely horrible Calculus teacher in high school. The good thing was that he knew he was horrible. He mostly didn't show up. But he did bring in Super 8 movies of lessons prepared by the State University of New York on a couple of occasions. I remember impressing math majors with my thorough understanding of Rolle's theorem and the Mean Value Theorem. The films were *not* lectures, they were animated examples, illustrated by improbable but interesting "real life" examples. Pedagogically brilliant, imho.