The One Minute Egg(head)

The Irascible Professor^SM

"In the future, everyone will be smart for one minute. "

- Carolyn Foster Segal -

by Carolyn Foster Segal.

It sounds like a joke: a community college is offering what it calls "micro-lectures," whose lengths run from one to three minutes (presumably the extended three-minute lectures are for subjects like Calculus IV).  In fact, at one time it was a joke -- as in Father Guido Sarducci's "The Five-Minute University."  But this is no laughing matter.  There's no time for laughter, or much of anything else.  We've got some serious business to take care of here -- and quickly.

 

The front page of a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article by David Shieh with the title "These Lectures Are Gone in 60 Seconds: Minute-long talks find success at a community college" (March 6. 2009).  The college leading the (concise) clarion call here is San Juan College, in Farmington, New Mexico, where last fall's first venture in micro-lectures, in an online degree program in occupational safety, was so successful that the school is now "expanding  [micro-lectures] to subjects like reading, tribal government, and veterinary studies."

 

This exciting new pedagogical development should be a relief to everyone and has arrived just in time, for it's the perfect answer to current economic concerns.  Instead of cutting course offerings, we can save our classes by simply cutting 95% of the course content.  Students, who have long complained about tedious class sessions and the price (and contents) of textbooks, will now be able to complete a traditional four-year program in just one semester.  Administrators will be delighted to find that enrollments will "quickly balloon."  In its second semester, enrollment in that program on occupational safety "grew to 449."  (What is the maximum capacity for a program on "occupational safety" in cyberspace?)  Nor should faculty members despair -- they should have no difficulty in creating and executing hundreds of these new online lectures.  The article reassures readers that "course development is relatively quick" as indeed it must be, since the new verbiage-free micro-lectures should take about as much time to design and/or deliver as it takes to compose a quick e-mail message.  Course content should be slightly less heavier, in other words, than the home page of About.com.

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