Have you ever heard of flipped classrooms? My uni is obsessed with it and it drives me nuts! Unfortunately, I have because I dealt with the style of teaching in a class called chemistry for engineers. Buckle up, I'm going on a rant. Those of you who don't know what a flipped classroom is, it's essentially the idea that a professor will record all of the lectures for that semester for the class that they're teaching ahead of time, and then you as a student will be expected to watch those lectures on Canvas or Blackboard or whatever you're using before the actual in-person lecture. And this is my first issue. You have double the lectures. This is sustainable for maybe one or two courses, if it's pushed it. But for five engineering courses, you can't watch double lectures every single week. It's not sustainable. Every professor, if they were to adopt this style of teaching, so many more students would fail. Because again, it's not sustainable. My second issue is that some of the professors that are using this style of teaching will try to take advantage of the opportunity to sacrifice their own students' success to make their own lives easier. And I'm not saying this is every single professor. Of course not. But I can speak for dozens of other comments I've seen on my own videos and I've made videos on this topic in the past, where people are agreeing with me, saying the exact same things that have happened to them. In the fall of 2021, when I was taking chemistry for engineers, in the 2021 year, the professor was using videos from 2011. 10-year-old videos. They were grainy, the audio quality was terrible, it was a horrible experience. And what this does is it allows the professor to never have to record these lectures again, because like I said, they're rolling the lectures over and over and over again, year after year after year. And it really just sucks for the students because after every single year, the quality gets worse and worse and worse, and the students get hurt more and more and more. And here's my last issue. Let's say you get through this terrible quality video, you write down all the questions that you have, which by the way, super unproductive because you can't ask them live. And then the following day, you go to the in-person lecture. And assuming that you watched it one day prior, which a lot of good students don't want to do. They want to watch it a couple days prior. And now you've told all these questions and it's just a mess. It's unproductive, insane, unproductive for the students. And it is a terrible way to teach. I was 18 years old trying to figure out how to study on my own and that's the bullshit I get handed my first semester. It's terrible. And then, you know, you go into the in-person lecture and now everybody's fighting to ask their questions because, you know, in a real live lecture, the questions are spread out. Some student has a question about the first topic, the professor's covering in the last topic. And then those same students have a question about the first and last topic that are covered in the free recorded lecture. Well, now they're asking them at the same time. So everybody has their hands up right at the beginning of the class, and it's just a mess. It's unproductive, insane, unproductive for the students, and it is a terrible way to teach.
