iTunes U better than attending class?

ReadWriteWeb and New Scientist picked up on a preliminary piece of research that suggests better retention and learning is achieved through using an audio podcast of a lecture than actually attending it.

To find out how much students really can learn from podcast lectures alone - mimicking a missed class - McKinney's team presented 64 students with a single lecture on visual perception, from an introductory psychology course.

Half of the students attended the class in person and received a printout of the slides from the lecture. The other 32 downloaded a podcast that included audio from the same lecture synchronised with video of the slides. These students also received a printed handout of the material.

The researchers told the students they would be tested on the material in a week, and they also asked students to hold onto their class notes.

The results?

Students who downloaded the podcast averaged a C (71 out of 100) on the test - substantially better than those who attended the lecture, who on average mustered only a D (62).

But that difference vanished among students who watched the podcast but did not take notes. Students who listened to the podcast one or more times and took notes had an average score of 77.

Stephen Downes rightly questions the soundness of the research but this is just preliminary results and hopefully more substantial findings will be reported, not just the attention grabbing headline. However we already know from plenty of other studies that note-taking forms a big component of effective reflection and processing of new information. We also know that the ability to learn at your own pace, rewind/review video and audio must aid comprehension. We also know that it is extremely difficult for most human beings to concentrate fully in a lecture environment which has far too many environmental variables that are likely to compete against the goal of effective knowledge transfer and comprehension (interruptions, noise, stilted delivery of speaker, poor viewing position etc). Note that I make a clear distinction between a lecture/presentation and a carefully designed interactive session/workshop.

So, while this study is not enough on its own here are some other supporting studies.

There is another specific study that comparatively tested podcasts, video and text transcript as distance learning alternatives to physically attending lectures and found positive results - can't find the reference myself - can anyone help on that?

Laboured Lectures Lack Lasting Impact

I have an enthusiastic interest in memory and how our brains learn. So I thought I'd try and learn some more from the experts using some of the openly available material from MIT. I came across something that looked interesting (well to me anyway):

Neurobiology of Memory: How Do We Acquire, Consolidate and Recall Memory

Speaker: Susumu Tonegawa, Director, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory

Tonegawa experiments on mice by playing with their genes and observing the resultant effect on their brains and subsequent ability to acquire and recall information about their surroundings. In doing so, he's exploring how memory and learning works at the cellular and biochemical level.

Now what was interesting about watching the video of this was how hard it was to get the value from his presentation. At least with the video being captured they had the opportunity to refer back. Not only that, a wider audience such as myself could benefit - even if only to a limited extent. To be fair, I did pick up an interesting snippet. Apparently Gabriel Garcia Marquez in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" predicted that sleep helps consolidate memory. Neuroscience is now proving this, and indeed I picked up on this just recently in my Snooze and Learn Faster post (which also caught Clive Shepherd's imagination).

However, as Donald Clark and others have remarked, many lectures are delivered without any form of information capture that students can refer back on (outside of their own notes, which perhaps aren't as comprehensive as they should be). It also begs the question that lecturers should first and foremost consider how they deliver their message in a more coherent fashion designed for students to interact with outside of the lecture theatre. Indeed wouldn't it be better to record the main presentation as video/annotated powerpoint, even with some level of useful interaction/visualization, and then arrange for students to attend a Q/A style session either physically or virtually? Surely the discourse and level of useful knowledge transfer would be a lot greater?

Granted, you still hear the argument that students will just not bother to turn up to lectures at all and not prepare for Q/A sessions, but I don't buy that. I was fortunate to be an educational guinea pig for my first degree in Information Technology at Salford University, near Manchester in the UK. This course was deliberately structured so that lecture session notes were provided for you, that attendance was for questioning and discussion, rather than a one way attempt at brain dumping. Interesting phrase that - "brain dumping". It suggests that what is dumped stays in one place, whereas we know we forget most of it almost instantly, especially without sufficient time for assimilation. Perhaps we should call it "fly-tipping of the mind" instead.