Jon SterlingJan 27, 2025

I have broken it to my students that I will not be releasing lecture recordings anymore (except in cases where it is warranted—put away your pitchforks!). The reaction is like watching a demon being exorcised... one passes through each stage of grief. By the way, to make up for this, I have made commitments to my students of personal engagement that go far beyond what almost any other lecturer here offers.

This could be catastrophic for my ratings, but in the end, I want to give great and engaging lectures that delight and encourage my students. And the twin evils of (1) being on the record at all times, and (2) having recording policies that make it benefit-negative for students to attend Lecture makes it nearly impossible for me to do that.

So I'm taking a stand.

Show threadBoardersJan 27, 2025
@jonmsterling though I am a critic of “back to office” policies (since I see unwavering corporate policies as rigidly implemented and exclusionary of women from participating in public life), I do believe the collective unconscious will, and is, shifting back towards understanding that we are physically embodied and being in a lecture course with your fellow students and instructors is actually not going to be replaced by watching on YouTube (we are years out from the MOOC fantasy, and yet it remains like a living zombie)
Show threadEli 💚 chaos 🌋🎲👾Jan 27, 2025
@boarders @jonmsterling Most universities are not designed for remote learning like e.g The Open University is, which functions very differently from MOOC-type courses or like whatever universities were forced to do during the pandemic. We have small lectures/tutorials where students are actively engaged, we have our own books that are externally reviewed all the time and are very well-made, and most students (esp those who continue year after year) are super motivated. 1/2
Show threadEli 💚 chaos 🌋🎲👾Jan 27, 2025
@boarders @jonmsterling Basically there needs to be a lot of funding to support proper remote learning but the way it was done during the pandemic in regular unis is not it and it's good that we are throwing that out, yet we should be thinking how to make it better and get funding for developing these programs because there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to study otherwise. Just having lectures recorded and lecture notes online is nothing in comparison to what we could have.
Show threadJJ Jan 27, 2025

@eli @boarders @jonmsterling i disagree with this - i think that lecture notes slides and notes specifically are one of the most valuable things to make public. i don't think there needs to be much of anything proper about it to get 90% of the benefit.

very frequently when i am trying to learn some topic some professor's lecture notes not only come up but are the only thing that comes up. i think people underestimate the utility of just... information, freely online. for more introductory topics where there are plenty of existing resources online, sure, putting them online without some structure is probably not too valuable. but this is not the case for ex. any linguistics material past the third year.

(and also, personal opinion: i don't think remote learning ever was good over the pandemic...)

Show threadBoardersJan 27, 2025

@jj @eli @jonmsterling I don’t think anyone here is against freely available lecture notes online, certainly not me!* - it is a wider conversation about how learning takes place in community and about what job we expect of lecturers. Should we expect them to also be multimedia producers? If not, should the university hire people to do such work, and if so, how would that look, what is the ideal format in which to run such mixed media classes? etc.

* these resources though are for people who are already self-directed learners which I view as a distinct group from everyone a university is supposed to educate and part of a “liberal arts” education is to liberate one to be free to pursue such ends in such self-directed ways

Show threadJJ Jan 27, 2025
@boarders @eli @jonmsterling i don't consider myself a self-directed learner and i think lecture notes are invaluable. the point i'm trying to make is: quite frequently learning materials do not need to be processed or have any notion of quality to be useful - they just need to be out there
Show threadJon SterlingJan 27, 2025

@jj @boarders @eli That's true, and many students will agree — but in the end, this needs to be balanced with the fact that lecturers do not enjoy their unedited performances being available to be watched dozens of times, and maybe even shared. It has a chilling effect on us.

I understand that there's definitely trade-offs here, but as a worker I want to have more control over what I produce and how it is used.

Show threadtheHigherGeometerJan 29, 2025
@jonmsterling @jj @boarders @eli my lockdown calculus recordings done in my home office, sometimes late at night, have continued to be used in combination with another lecturer's recordings that he gave up on halfway through the following semester. The University will cease to exist at the end of the year and the replacement entity will have a wholly new everything, so finally they will stop using them. As much as I was flattered by some of the feedback in 2020/21 after I stopped, I really wish someone else would have done a better job by now. The department was just so short-staffed they couldn't afford people to actually teach that material afresh...
Show threadJon Sterling
@highergeometer @jj @boarders @eli God.... what a nightmare...
Jan 29, 2025 at 9:20amWeb
Show threadtheHigherGeometerJan 29, 2025

@jonmsterling and I haven't been employed in the maths department for three years, and haven't been employed at the university at all for a year (I have an adjunct affiliation for research purposes only)

@jj @boarders @eli