Video comes of Age

I first came across flexible learning at a conference in Nottingham in December 1976. I signed on for a study group on ‘Self Paced Learning’ which sounded intriguing. When I discovered it meant teaching without lectures I was immediately hooked because much of my own rather unorthodox undergraduate career (atWitwatersrand and Cambridge)had involved studying without lectures, or with very unhelpful ones. Fred Hoyle began his lectures on electromagnetism by announcing that he was going to ignore the existing syllabus, on which we were nevertheless to be examined, in favour of a new syllabus just agreed for the following year. I agreed with him that the existing syllabus was boring, but managed to answer a large number of questions on it in the exam, which was fortunate as I was totally defeated by Chris Zeeman’s questions on topology which bore no relation to anything which had appeared in the lectures…Teaching without lectures is made possible through advances in video technology. The author reviews how his video^s have been used to develop interactive video discs and the need to continually exploit the latest technology…