This is a new low for this particular university and universities in general.
Like many of you, I love being a part of Carleton and the community, but I cannot disregard this at all, nor can I wait until course evaluation at the end of March to voice my displeasure.
I’m talking about Carleton using only video-on-demand (VOD) format to teach some of its courses. I’m not sure how many courses this affects, but I am personally involved in one.
This course is pretty ridiculous to begin with. We learn how to do research using search engines and why we do this kind of research.
We do not have personal interactions with the professors like traditional lectures. All of our lectures are in the form of VOD, whether we like it or not. On paper, VODs may be great: Students learn on their own time, and it gets the university money without having to worry about too many students registering.
Get them to pay the extra $50 and problem solved.
In my opinion, it is so much more ineffective than a traditional classroom. If I have a question, I can’t raise my hand and ask. I have to email the professor, explain what the question is about in context, and even give the time stamp. By the time you receive a response, you could’ve gotten a response from Google after hours of searching, or worse, forgotten why you asked that to begin with.
If the professor asks a question you think you know the answer to, he or she isn’t going to pick you no matter how high your hand is. Instead, you get an answer that’s barely audible. I’m sure my puppy, with hearing like a champ, would have issues picking up on any sound received by those classroom speakers.
TAs are our main point of contact for this course. That’s right— I, along with hundreds of other students, am paying professors money for this travesty.
In this particular course, we are watching lectures from last semester’s course. There are usually two professors teaching the course (I don’t know why), and this semester, they’re “supervising” a contract prof, who supervises the TAs, who supervises us students. Why it is so needlessly complicated is beyond me.
At the beginning of the course, the two head professors mentioned that this is a format they are trying that would give us “the best approach to learning . . . and we think it’s one that would work very well.” Well, when the course is being taught by a talking screen and someone who appears to have been thrown into the fire in being a teacher’s assistant (and possibly only doing it for resumé reasons), no, it really does not bloody work.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, and I’m sure that there are those who disagree. Maybe your TA actually knows what to do during tutorials, and this format actually works better for your learning style and schedule. For that, I’m incredibly jealous of you.
— Abraham Lau,
third-year psychology and law
