1. A Canadian undergraduate student pays about $6000/year for enrolling in 10 courses at a Canadian university. Each course has about 50-hours worth of lectures and tutorials, so each 1-hour class contact costs $12. A good lecture is like having a nice lunch but is more expensive than watching a movie. A lecture can be inspiring or dull, which are two possible outcomes from watching a movie.
2. I don't believe a university course should be directly applicable to "real world". My one-year experience working for industry taught me that even a managerial job in an oil and gas company will become a routine over 6 months.
But a course should at least improve students' thinking skills: filtering information from different sources, independently testing opinions against facts, articulating thoughts into an actionable plan.
3. Incorporating active learning components into courses is a key part of teaching, something that I will start doing this year. Students these days (i) do not easily defer to an authority figure and (ii) work and communicate constantly in group.
A traditional delivery method - where a teacher scribes on a board and students observe - will be a thing of the past, especially with the forward march of online course delivery companies like Coursera and Udacity.
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