[smaudet]

Classroom experience is so rarely useful, the ONLY time you benefit is when either a) you already studied the subject and the professor is good and mentions something tangential/extra credit, or b) the classroom size is small, so when you don't understand something you can say so without fear of class disruption and the teacher can spend more time tailoring their curriculum to their class.

Otherwise yes, you are often better off with the book and homework and actually completing both.

And this is where I usually go off on my rant how college is useless for education - you can 'learn' peer interaction but even this way nothing forces you to make friends or connections, so the inherent use is close to nill.

[Ntrails]

I believe this may be true for you, but it is not true for me.

I find classrooms engaging and I actually internalise information in a way that reading is only ever surface level.

[Aeolun]

I don’t find classrooms particularly engaging, but an open book in front of me is even less so. Classrooms are basically the only way I get any not-immediately-interesting learning done.

[TRiG_Ireland]

It does depend what you're learning, too. Anything practical (chemistry lab skills, for example) will need a classroom. And languages probably do too.

(If you do Deaf Studies in Trinity College, University of Dublin, one of the lectures is on Deaf Culture, Perspectives on Deafness, Working with the Deaf Community. The lecturer is himself Deaf, and will lecture in ISL. There's an interpreter present to voice the lecture for the hearing students (and to interpret any questions, of course). In third year, you lose the interpreter. By that stage, you should be fluent enough in ISL from your ISL classes to no longer need one.)

[anonymousDan]

I can't say I agree with this. If there is anything I learned from COVID it is the value of in-person teaching.

[chalst]

I had the luxury of going to Oxford, when colleges gave tutorials to two or three students at a time. For most topics, I figured out what had been covered in the lectures from the tutorial problems, read up that material in the book I was using, and then solved the tutorial problems.

There were a few topics that I attended the lectures, either because the lecturer was very good or because no book was adequate. The subject was mathematics, but I knew people from other fields who approached study in a similar way.

[Mezzie]

It's wildly dependent on the topic.

I never went to my physics classes in college - there was no attendance requirement outside of lab and I saw no reason to since math and science were easy for me to grok on my own.

On the other hand, I also studied languages and classroom and face to face time is almost essential for in-depth language study. Language study isn't usually lecture based, though. Not going to my Chinese or Arabic classes would have been a bad time.