Duke has somehow tripped over the discovery that most students are slackers who don't know how to study or why they should. They wouldn't thoughtfully apply any tool given to them. There are other cognitive style factors here also, unrelated to motivation.
- not all people learn by listening (note the higher use among foriegn students who need to hear the language again for comprehension)
- many professors are bores or unpolished speakers who are painful to listen to in person--why would the student want to listen to mind sucking drivel a second time?
- probably most profesors haven't revised their lectures to be comprehensible without the visual element. "As you can see from this equation, the result gets bigger over time." makes no sense without the equation.
"The picture shows how fashion changes," makes no sense on an iPod.
"Note that Bejamin Harrison was the first US President to wear a four-in-hand (modern) tie," makes perfect sense.

The first post made some good points but not all of them make sense. A professor shouldn't need to adapt their lectures to be iPod-friendly unless the primary goal of the university is to become radio-friendly like a Podcast correspondence course. To optimize a lecture for an iPod is to avoid use of whiteboards, overhead projectors, Apple Keynote, or other visual aids. And the answer there is not to start videotaping them, unless you have at least two cameras (one for the lecturer and one for the screen or whiteboard), because nothing is recognizable on a whiteboard seen across the room at video resolution.

The ultimate answer is to do what that student should do when paying x thousand dollars to sit in that chair. Be active instead of passive, because active listening helps you remember. In other words, pick up that pen and start taking and sketching some damn notes!

Well professors should make it easier to "view the lecture later" and combine the recording with the visual content. What if you could record your lecture, and also download a powerpoint with all the slides or visuals in the lecture. With elearning inititives, this would be easy to implement and make the lectures more valuable.

In my experience, I never got a really clean recording from my lectures, and it is hard to "bookmark" places in the lecture to refer to. This might work well with Office 2004 ability to add voice notes and if there was integration there, combining text, images and sound.

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Anonymous wrote:
Well professors should make it easier to "view the lecture later" and combine the recording with the visual content. What if you could record your lecture, and also download a powerpoint with all the slides or visuals in the lecture. With elearning inititives, this would be easy to implement and make the lectures more valuable.

I completely disagree. I mean, not in theory, but in practice. In many of the classes I've taken, the professors use powerpoint for lecture, but hardly offer anything new when they speak; it's almost word-for-word from the powerpoint. That in combination with reading from the text, going to lecture for some classes is completely pointless, and lectures are therefore virtually useless (as long as you've downloaded the powerpoints and read the book). Of course, other profs add lots in their actual lectures besides the powerpoint, and some don't use powerpoint at all; but still, the more you make electronic, the less kids will show up to class.