I’m a big fan of The Teaching Company‘s Great Courses series, wherein professors deliver what amounts to an undergraduate course. The professors are selected at least as much for the quality of their teaching as for whatever they’ve accomplished in their more specialized research (which is largely irrelevant for a survey course, in any case), and it shows.
Having just completed the course on civil liberties, I checked the history of the US Supreme Court out from the Montclair library, and am disappointed. Not through any fault of the lecturer, but rather because the lecture is not delivered to a live audience. Where the lectures are usually lively, this one sounds more like someone reading a book aloud. A professional actor can read a novel aloud and make it exciting; some authors can, too. But a professor reading a text on an admittedly dry subject doesn’t come off as well. Put me right to sleep, though that was no doubt in part due to a long day as a substitute teacher.
Again I emphasize that there’s nothing particularly wrong with the professor; it’s just that, without a live audience, there’s a certain…oomph missing.
People occasionally complain that no studio recording, no matter how polished, can ever match a certain indefinable pizzazz of a concert performance, or even a recording of a live performance. While accepting that this is so, at least in the subjective realm of taste among music fans, I never shared that opinion, never even really sensed that energy that concert fans claim. But put me in my natural habitat of academia, and the difference is abundantly clear.
Postscript: Whoops! I got to the end of the fist CD, and the audience applauded. I guess the difference isn’t so abundantly clear after all. But…damn. It still sounds like he’s reading somebody else’s book. I’ve grown so used to the high standard of teaching in the Great Courses series that I simply presumed there must be some extraordinary explanation for the flatness of the lecturer. I still half suspect the applause is a sound effect artificially added at the end; there’s no other sound in the lecture—no coughing, no shift of chairs, no murmurs even as they applaud—and, as I say, the lecture sure doesn’t sound live.
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