"There is no need to go to lectures"

 or so it would seem, "because you can do it on line from home. You can do it at a time which suits you too."

Ooh...sounds so good if you are a young university student who would prefer to use the morning for sleeping in or the student juggling a full time job and a part time degree.  This is so good if you simply do not want to crawl out of a cosy bed in winter or go out in the hot summer sun. 

Is it really so good though? The universities here are now playing with "remote teaching and learning". Where possible lectures will go on line. They can then be accessed at a time convenient to the student and it will free up staff to do whatever it is they do when they are not facing the students.

I can see problems with this. At teacher training college we actually had to sign in to each lecture. An attendance sheet would be passed around and we had to put our initials next to our names. Missing a lecture had consequences too. Medical certificates were much more difficult to come by back then and some students found themselves in real strife. Unlike me, dutifully working my way through as a (very) junior housemistress in a boarding school for girls, they were state bonded and attendance was compulsory. Of course people got around it. It was expected other people would forge your signature, that students would take it in turn to attend and more.

I had no such chances there. I was there under sufferance. I made sure I turned up to lectures and that I handed in my assignments on time. The one occasion on which I did not was in my final year. Mum's mother had died. She came over to the city. I went over to the island we were living on at the time. I taught her class in her absence (unpaid) and still managed to write the assignment but not type a clean copy. I managed to get an overnight extension to do that but was told I would only get a "P" for it. (P was for pass.) That was the ruling of the college principal, a man who made it quite clear he thought I had no right to be there. 

Life might have been much easier if I had not needed to go to lectures but would I have wanted that? I doubt it. Our lectures there ranged from very formal to informal. You knew which lecturers you could ask questions of in class and which lecturers you did not interrupt.

A couple of years later I headed off to London. I went to university there and discovered that you could ask questions. Questions were encouraged. Suddenly learning really began to mean something again. We could come out of a lecture all "fired up". We talked about what had been said, about the assignment we had been given, about a teaching point and much more. This seemed to me to be what a university should be about. For the first time in my life I felt as if my capacity to learn was being stretched.

Much later I went back to being a student for a while. I needed to know some law, rather a lot of law. I enrolled in a law faculty and kept myself together by tutoring in psychology and teaching the finer points of the English language to students from other backgrounds. The contrast was often interesting. In the first year of law school it was all very different. My reading speed dropped dramatically. I mentioned this to my first year tutor. She laughed when I told her what it had dropped to and said something like, "I think you might find that is about three times faster than those straight out of school." It still seemed slow to me and my good friend C..., much smarter than I am, agreed.

We got away with a lot though because we could ask questions in class. Lecture styles varied and some lecturers were more able than others. On more than one occasion one of the older students doing law as a post-graduate would ask a very pertinent question and there would often be a "thank you for asking that" and a new case example might be given or the Latin explained. 

Jurisprudence was no longer a compulsory subject but one I knew I needed to do. It was not a popular subject. There were just sixteen of us in the class. The lecturer would engage us from the start. How? What? Why? Who developed this? I would happily have done an entire degree in jurisprudence. We were treated like intelligent adults. 

I discovered gaps in the knowledge of my lecturers. On one occasion I found myself explaining a statistical procedure to one of my tutors. She stopped me and went to find another staff member so I could explain it to both of them. On another occasion I had to explain what language planning was - and that led to yet another thesis. It was as new an idea to the staff as law was to me but we respected each other and communicated.

I doubt any of this would have happened without face to fact contact. The "give and take" would simply not be there. I would not have mixed with my fellow students. I would not have had the thrill of one of my English language students rushing in to me and flinging her arms around me and saying, "I passed! I passed!"

University is not simply about listening to a lecture at a time which is convenient. Time spent there should be about challenging our ideas, about exchanging ideas, about searching for information and responding to questions which are set. It should be about new ideas, new arguments and discussions which stimulate these things.

"Going to lectures on line" is not going to do that. The standard here is already far too low...and about to get lower still.