The modern young adult possesses two inherent traits: a natural inclination to put off work till it becomes crunch time and a deep-rooted appreciation for binge watching television. And though there may be online video lectures, I think we need to go a step above video lectures and appeal to the masses better. How?
Create Classes as a show on Netflix.
Essentially, each class lecture would star the professor, TAs and old students in different scenarios teaching the class the concepts of each unit through various dialogues with other professors, anxious background music and various camera techniques which heighten the viewer’s experience.
Think about it. It should come to no one’s surprise that many of us are lazy, and many of us just want to stay in bed all day. With classes as shows on Netflix, this takes away a host of problems and makes college much more fun.
Also, if professors could create shows that engaged their students like shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, House of Cards and Game of Thrones do, academia in the U.S. will revolutionize the rest of the world.
Time tickets will be a thing of the past since every possible class will be on the database. The only way to get to courses with prerequisites is by finishing the show (class) before it.
Students have no excuses for sleeping through a class and could take the class at the hour that’s most convenient for them.
This also enables students, rather than professors, to control the pace of the class.
Unlike the modern class, where the professor gets a general consensus as to how fast their students feel the class is going, classes on Netflix let the slow learners go slow and the faster learners go fast and everything in-between.
Some old practices can still stand. Obviously, some of us need the extra help by attending office hours. Once the professors have finished filming their shows for each class, their days for years will be cleared so much that holding an hour or three of office hours each week for students will be nothing to the tens of hours each week spent researching.
Classes being put on Netflix would force students to talk about their studies like they do any other TV show. They’ll be engaged, learning, intrigued. Over the course of a few years, students could submit ideas of what episodes were better and worse and what the professors could do to improve.
This definitely isn’t for everybody. This system promotes solitude over social interaction. It promotes laziness and doing things on your own time rather than learning that the world doesn’t revolve around yourself and we have to do things on other peoples’ schedules. The system also would raise issues on how to prevent students from cheating.
But like any young adolescent would say, we can put that off till later.