This [is] easily addressed by letting software be the key to additional assignments and lectures. First the students watch a video lecture. Next they apply what they have learned in the form of an electronic assignment.
But there are
so many assumptions here. First, you've assumed that the lecture provides everything the student needs. It almost certainly won't. Our experience with my son's online learning is that an enormous amount of material is missing. Of the 7 online classes my son did last year, only ONE (CTY Forensics) provided enough information in the lectures and textbook for him to really understand the material without assistance from me.
You've also assumed that a video format
can provide enough information. There are subjects in which this is simply not the case. Physics and Java programming spring to mind. I've helped DS with physics and my husband and another programmer helped him with Java. There are nuances in both subjects that simply must be taught, live, on the fly. In physics, the big one is how to recognize how you need to set up problems in order to solve them. This is NOT a single idea but a set of ideas and approaches that vary and build upon one another as a student advances. And there are other nuances, like the difference between a horse-cart system and a horse and a cart. Students don't all have the same confusion points, and you need a teacher there to help because the number of confusion points in some subjects is
effectively infinite. You can't cover that in a video.
With Java, the issues seemed related to knowing how to do stuff when the teacher's assumption that something would just work, didn't. An example is a security exception that was thrown when my son had to do something with an applet in his final project. The teacher assumed the applet would just work, presumably because it worked x years ago when the course was designed. It took two adults with 40 years experience 3 hours to solve that. For something complex like this, there is no way it can happen via email or even the next day in a class when everyone is confused.
(Please don't argue that outdated courses don't count because they
should be up to date. Obviously, they should be up to date. But there is
no way this will happen in the real world!)
