publishing classes

Every night before class, often at 1 or 3 or 5 in the morning, the head LING 100 TA puts his lecture notes online. The idea is that the students can print them on virgin paper and bring them to class to take notes on.

But really, if you already have the entire class laid out on PowerPoint, why come to class? And if you do print them out and bring them to class, the element of surprise is completely gone. "So, what other questions does this raise? Oh, never mind, the answer's on the next slide."

As we publish more and more of class, there is less and less incentive for students to actually go. For LING 100, we publish lectures, discussion notes, discussion note answers, homeworks, and homework answers. It's a lot more work for the teacher to prepare- and it doesn't reduce the work done while actually teaching the class, since that's a pre-defined 50 minutes. There's no reason to go to class to get assignments- the syllabus has them all laid out, and they're distributed online. Or to turn in assignments, since most classes do that online too (we do collect hard copies of the homeworks- syntax trees and phonetic symbols are not very amenable to computers.)

Pretty much the only reason to go to class anymore is because it's a part of your grade- recorded with more technology, of course. iClickers, little remotes with A,B,C,D, and E, are used to answer multiple choice questions during class, which is recorded as attendance. But if class was, as it used to be, something you could only get by going to class, maybe we wouldn't need all these attendance incentives.