[UncleMeat]

> Listening to a professor speaking to himself from a distance of 10 meters is an awful experience compared to a video recording that you can stop/rewind. Heck, you can even take some proper notes that you will actually understand!

My wife is a professor.

What you say is true for some students. But for some students it appears that paying attention is much harder when it is a video vs the same material presented in a live lecture. I can't fully explain it, but "I struggle to pay attention to video lectures" is a surprisingly common response from people who have been strong students in prior years.

[jrumbut]

Can't pay attention to video lectures at the best of times is part of it, but I also think being consistently understimulated causes people to shut down the learning process.

[randcraw]

I've attended both kinds of credit-granting uni courses, and I agree that watching a recorded video is indeed less involving. But video is also so much easier than a live lecture to stop, rewind, repeat, or play 50% slower/faster that I can't conclude either is clearly superior.

I'd say superiority mostly comes down to the quality of the instruction — clarity, good organization of fundamentals, then broad and deep enumeration of concepts that build meaningfully on those fundamentals. In my experience, few professors value teaching enough to master it. When one does, I'd very much like to be able to attend such a lecture.

Maybe the best of both worlds is to deliberately supplement primary content with outstanding reference material like Kahn Academy or Three Blue One Brown. Being able to drill down on difficult concepts from multiple perspectives is often a great way to resolve obstructions in any kind of teaching method.