Streaming audio helps enhance the benefits of traditional lectures while eliminating some of their drawbacks. For example, I dislike the passivity of students as they listen to an extended in-class presentation and resent spending precious classroom hours in this way. Streaming audio makes it possible to present a lecture without taking up classroom time in lecture-form presentation. I have made streaming audio files of each of the lectures I use in the courses I taught in the fall of 1999. I assign the lectures as homework, so that my students can listen to the lecture whenever they want.
All lectures are available as links on the course Web page.
Students can pause, back up, and replay the lectures, or parts of them, as many times as they wish, so that they can make notes, answer the telephone, make a cup of coffee, and so on. With more time to assimilate the lecture material, they can also think more critically about it an activity that should be encouraged. Using Virtual Handouts I compose Web pages for use in conjunction with each lecture, much as I used to make up handouts. It s easy to make simple diagrams with a basic graphics program like Windows Paint and include them in the Web handouts. Students can either look at these pages on line while listening to the lecture, or they can print out the handouts and write their lecture notes directly on them.