In case you don’t know, there are numerous companies that create videos lasting for 45-75 minutes on a variety of topics that might be covered in college courses. They work as substitutes for lectures and cost between $200 and $350 each.
I remember the exact moment when the Instructional Video Craze started. It was 2002, and the university where I worked at that time assigned a massively popular course to be taught by somebody who had no qualifications to teach anything anywhere. Delivering 3 lectures a week to an audience of 100 might be quite hard if you don’t hold a single degree in the discipline. So the person in question got the department to buy a bunch of videos to the tune of several thousand dollars and limited his teaching to putting on these videos. Understandably, the enrollment in the course dropped to under 20 within 3 years.
Of course, this is an extreme case. However, the Instructional Videos Craze has been following me from one university to another. Colleagues and administrators have exhorted me to use these videos in lieu of my own lectures. One supervisor even told me that my insistence on preparing my own lectures for 100% of classes was evidence of poor teaching skills.
“You need to learn to be less controlling of your classroom,” she said.
It is true that the idea of ceding control over my classroom to the makers of commercial instructional videos or to supervisors is unacceptable to me. I show movies and documentaries in class but only the real kind, not some overpriced commercial product.
These instructional videos were the first step towards MOOCs, and neither they nor MOOCs have any relation to higher education. If people want to use them as a form of entertainment, that’s up to them. Serious education, however, is something entirely different.
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