When you know why, how is irrelevant
Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay
Yesterday, I livestreamed and published the final lecture in my introductory course in building acoustics. When the dust had settled, I realized that I have never ever felt such a sense of meaning, in anything I have done in my professional career. There has been a lot of friction along the way, especially with technology. Yesterday’s lecture was a personal record in IT problems. First, I did not click the right button when the stream started, so I accidentally presented the first ten minutes of the lecture to an audience that could not see or hear me, and thus had to start from the beginning again. And then my computer crashed in the middle of the lecture and required a reboot. These are major setbacks, but I am amazed by how fast I could just snap back into it and continue the livestream with a genuine smile on my face. As Nietzsche said, “he who has a why, can bear almost any how”. My livestreaming lecture endeavour was a clear example that he was correct.
The technical resistance pushed my lecture well beyond the two scheduled hours. Usually I find it disrespectful to an audience, or anyone for that matter, to fail to keep your allotted time slot when doing a presentation of any form. But I have realized that livestreaming lectures are different in that matter. Time is not sacred in the same way. One of the reasons I could calmly soldier on even though I was heading into overtime, was that I knew that the audience can pause the stream and come back later when it suits them. It is not like anyone can stay focused for two hours straight anyway. Who are we trying to fool? Even when the IT is working like a well-oiled machinery, you might still feel the need to take a break, grab a coffee or go to the toilet. When you are livestreaming the lecture, none of these things is a problem! And it gets better, you can still ask questions in the chat and drop comments even if you aren’t listening in synchronized real-time due to a little break. If I get a question in the chat, I can always pick it up and deal with it a bit later or at the end of the stream. A delay of a couple of minutes isn’t that big of a deal. Instant feedback is not always required. There are other learning activities better suited to that.
This year, I had crammed a little bit more content into my lecture than what could fit, even with no IT problems. It’s only the second time that I present this course, so it’s not that surprising. In a normal classroom lecture, I would have engaged the turbo boost, or just skipped some sections altogether to make sure that I don’t go into overtime. But why would I do that in a livestream? The purpose of my lectures is not that they should be strictly two hours long. The purpose is to provide my audience with the best possible means to transform into independent civil and structural engineers. That is a task that does not end after just two hours. When I expanded my audience beyond the classroom (Yes, there are external people attending the live streams too), I have come to the following conclusion: Don’t treat your audience as students. Treat them as “real” engineers, working in the field. Because they are! You just have to look at time from a slightly different perspective. It is all about the process. A student invests a huge amount of time and money in their education. That’s why I feel that the least thing they should expect is to have the course material available afterwards. When a classroom lecture is finished, it is gone forever. The same goes for many other learning activities. The live streamed lectures on the other hand, will still be there in the cloud when my students need to dust off their acoustic skills for a project they are working on, a couple of years from now. And by then, the live streamed lectures will have iterated for a couple of years, so they can choose the course from the latest year, which will be even better than the one they attended. Perhaps they will even drop some comments in the chat, with feedback based on their years of experience? Can you imagine how valuable such a comment is to a teacher like me? Those comments tell me exactly what my course should contain, thereby making it more relevant. With live streamed lectures, we have circumvented time and created a link between academia and the “real world”.
This is the very definition of constructive alignment.