Highschool, Korea. A student is listening to a online lecture. by Jens-Olaf via Flickr.com

Classes on the Web, lectures on iPods and schools in Second Life. The education distribution model is constantly changing, and the students are in control of more parameters of the content. Selection of key topics, scanning syllabus for most-needed-to-study, and now, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that students are fast-forwarding their e-lectures.

Some professors report that when their students are reviewing class materials, the students speed up online recordings of lectures and zip through hour-long presentations in as little as 30 minutes. Sure, their professors sound like chipmunks. But the students say they can absorb the information faster than the professors deliver it.

The latest academic to note the trend is Jan Philipp Schmidt, manager of the Free Courseware Project at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa. “At the University of Taiwan, students watch calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded,” he wrote on his blog, Sharing Nicely, summing up comments he had heard at the recent Open Education Conference in Utah. Someone from a university in the Netherlands reported that students like to play videos at double speed, he wrote, “and someone from MIT said the same was true for users of MIT OpenCourseWare.”

In an interview with The Chronicle earlier this year, Al Ducharme, assistant dean of distance and distributed learning at the University of Central Florida, said that many students there speed up lecture videos so that they can watch a 50-minute lecture in about 35 minutes. “The information is coming so slowly, but students today can absorb the information much faster,” he said.

Should professors consider speeding up their acts? —Jeffrey R. Young

The article is short and contains no measure of comprehension.  If students, who are adapting to a always-on rich media environment, are able to speed up the information and comprehend, we should foster this ability.  Much like speed-reading feeds our brains at a speed closer to our ability, more info quicker with comprehension, then these skills need to be fostered to grow stronger students - ergo citizens.

Philipp Schmidt in his blog Sharing Nicely brings up two important points:

I would be interested to find out how self-learners that have no interest in assessment work with these videos - do they also find them too slow? And how do students feel about their professors (too slow)?

First, an excellent measure of hunger for content v. quickly finishing tedious study is if students who want the knowledge not the certificate are also eating content on “warp-speed”.

Secondly, educators need to engage students.  Active education feeds brains nutritious content that sticks to the bones and grows strong critical thinking muscles.  Perhaps, speeding up the lecture is an artificial way to create interesting lectures, by proxy of a more challenging comprehension rate.