When my daughter was looking at colleges a few years ago, she visited a class at every place she considered, and as I told her, part of the reason why I encouraged the classroom visiting is because I wanted her to feel she belonged, to reduce the “imposter syndrome” that affects so many undergraduate and graduate students. I also wanted her to feel entitled to the best instruction she experienced either in high school or when visiting colleges. Since she was interested in small colleges, discussion is generally what she experienced when visiting classes.
As I mentioned a few years ago, video of large lecture halls give a very different picture of college life, and in many ways you could say that one hidden curriculum of iTunes U is to teach those who are not in college that college is like sitting in an MIT lecture hall watching physicist Walter Lewin swing from the end of a pendulum. Mind you, that’s not an awful way to spend some time, Lewin is a wonderful performer, and that’s not all that iTunes U does; iTunes U has extensive material from my college and university that is not just lecturing. But the structure of iTunes and online lectures could easily give the picture to high school students that all you should expect in college is to plunk your rear end down with a few hundred classmates and watch the show.
Timothy Burke’s Pictures From an Institution series is a potential counterweight to that tendency, and I wish there more such descriptions. The link above is to descriptions of and pictures from the first day of one of his classes this semester at Swarthmore College. Swarthmore is on the opposite end of the spectrum from giant-lecture-hall-land; as a private liberal-arts college it has small classes, a gorgeous campus, and faculty who can focus on teaching. Burke’s short photoessays provide snapshots of a college experience with a faculty member’s perspective. I wish there were other faculty engaging in similar projects, or recording small discussions that prospective students could listen to or view; that would provide a reasonable counterweight to lecture videos.
I know that a number of admissions offices create videos that have the same aesthetic (read: marketing) design as viewbooks (the glossy, high-production pamphlets that my son is going to be receiving by the ton in the next year or so). These “viewbook” videos can make any campus look gorgeous, but that doesn’t give nearly enough sense of what students should expect from a discussion-oriented class…. or a lab or studio or any other type of class different from a lecture.