Lectures are shit

God I hate lectures.

Someone... talking.... really slowly... and with weird... pauses and EMPHASIS... and... while talking... really slowly... they repeat... that is, they REPEAT themselves... over and over... and say exactly what's written on the slide... even though you can read it on the slide... and they almost never... never seem to have planned (or rehearsed)... so they repeat... themselves... or explain something... out of context... or that isn't part of the... isn't supposed to be in the lecture... or they get out of sync with the slideshow... and repeat themselves when the right slide comes up... or they explain things... in the wrong ORDER.

And the sound quality of the recordings is awful, they never seem to bother editing them to cut out the five minutes of dead air at the start and finish, they always seem to have to skip through some of their slides because it took them longer than they expected, and they end up covering about ten minutes worth of information over the course of an hour.

I don't understand how people who do this all the time can be so consistently bad at it. Or, given how bad they are at it, why this method of teaching remains the standard. If the information given in lectures were provided in written form it would take me about five minutes to get through each one, and I'd be able to refer back to it later much more easily.

I will make one exception though. I've done classes with Curtin, Murdoch and Macquarie so far, and Macquarie seems to be just better at everything. One class with them had written lectures rather than video or audio ones, and they were great. The other one (that I'm doing currently) has audio lectures, but the lecturer clearly has a plan for what he's going to talk about (or possibly even a script), and the recordings are clear and there's no dead air or repetition. This goes along with the fact that Macquarie's website is far more useful and accessible than the other two.

But the only reason that Macquarie stands out as being so good is because of the comparison. The stuff they're doing should just be standard. They're not really doing anything special, it's just that everyone else is so bad.