I’m currently finishing my law degree and I can say that I have been a good student most of my life (except for the countless detention in my rebel years
e).
In some classes we can easily write on our
computer 10-15 pages of course notes minus case briefs. It seams like we’re only practicing our tapping skills until the midterms and finals where we truly “lock in”.
So I was wondering… what if profs made their full course notes available so that the students won’t have to write countless pages but only focus on the material and try to understand and exercise critical thinking?
Imagine if the student would simply have to do some quizzes and unlock the course notes of the prof! Students could go faster through the course notes and unlock other quizzes that could have subsequent course notes.
Students would learn faster no?
Would profs in general be willing to try this out?
As a student I use StuDoc but most materials are low quality and is filled with disinformation. I think this unlocking profs course notes would help fight against the “disinformation” and help students engage with the material – would love to have your take on this.
Comments
Because it misses the point
You can own all the books and texts you like. You can even read them. But note taking is a specific learning process which forces you to think about the material, review it and decide what the important points are.
I have specifically started reducing the amount of information on slide decks and handouts because students mistake printing them off or saving them and filing them as having learnt the material.
Personally I find this not learning. That’s more memorizing.
I sometimes give notes but it’s not useful if you don’t attend and also scribble away at the same time. But 10-15 pages does seem demanding.
I’d be interested to know what you think a professor’s course notes consist of. All academic staff will prepare differently depending upon their own personal style. Some will have copious notes, others will have a few bullet points consisting of areas to cover.
The best lectures (at least in my opinion) are the interactive ones. This lessons generally have less notes as the direction within limitations, will follow the discourse and reactions of the students. A good lecturer knows their subject so notes can be quite brief and lack the detail a student will want later.
I would strongly recommend students take their own notes as it is important that they understand them when it comes to revision. Lecture notes developed by the lecturer as a guide to delivering a class are not the same as those taken and needed by a student.
It sounds like you are trying to transcribe everything the professor is saying into your notes rather than synthesizing and extracting key information, which is the point of note taking.
a) Professor’s don’t necessarily have those kinds of notes
b) The learning happens when you actively take notes. You could grab any textbook and read that. But when you think about what is being said, and write it, you synthesize knowledge into your own words, process them in your brain. That’s what enables learning. Furthermore, you should actually go and synthesize them further into a “cheat sheet” so that you are able to distill what was important.
It is the process that’s important.
c) If you are taking 10-15 pages of notes, then you may need to be selective of what is important to note down and what is not. That again will help that learning process. Not everything said in class should be written down.
I say this not as a professor, but as some who took a class on learning strategies which taught me how to take notes in class, as an undergraduate student. Done properly, notes can be amazing in committing knowledge to long term memory, reducing the amount of time for studying for any test.
Another comment has already addressed this but course notes do not necessarily bear much if any resemblance to student notes. This is a deep misunderstanding of pedagogy, the teaching of something is not the same as the learning of it (even if teaching can facilitate its own learning).
I have had colleagues who have even made templates to aid in student note taking because it is seemingly a fading skill. The trouble I see with most of these is that different note taking methods are better for different students and while providing several templates would probably cover most students it wouldn’t cover all and it opens a whole can of worms on possibly needing to train on their proper use, try to achieve consistent quality, but really the main impediment is the amount of time and effort necessary and that presenting students with options is often a Pandora’s box.
I’m willing and capable of putting in that effort with groups of about five or fewer students and while it’s regrettable that many even most students don’t have this skill I can’t teach the material and this skill equitably in the time I normally have. I will say incorporating derivations and in class quizzes with printed material is also useful. Glossing material in parallel with a lecture is also an effective learning aid for me at least. The best version of actual notes I’ve seen given to students were produced by having TA’s take notes over the course of several iterations of a course and then editing and compiling these into several options. This was quite literally dozens to hundreds of hours of work across several people and it did produce a good product but I think it effectively communicates what is involved in doing this well. I think it’s worth emphasizing that producing a single version is not radically less time input.
Even after all that effort I’m not sure if the students learn better or worse if they have access to these curated notes or not. I’ve had some professors who did A B testing for these sorts of questions but you really need about 7-10 years of data on a course to reach a conclusion.