The debate over whether we should DVR the classroom experience

Just as entertainment has now been time-shifted thanks to the DVR, there are similar efforts underway to time-shift the educational experience, making course content available on-demand, any time you want, any place you want, on any device you want. This is either the greatest thing that has happened in the history of education or, conversely, just another way for predominantly white, high-income, college-educated elites to maintain their dominance via technology.

Perhaps no innovation better showcases this broader trend towards time-shifting the educational experience than the phenomenal rise of “lecture capture” technologies for the university classroom. At its core, “lecture capture” refers to the concept that every university lecture should be automatically recorded via video and/or other multimedia. Once it has been captured, this content can then be transformed into a more active learning experience. According to a new report from ResearchBeam, lecture capture could be a $672.25 billion industry by 2019, and from 2015-2019, it’s projected to grow at a 20 percent compound annual rate. All of the biggest educational players -- even the elite educational institutions that you might think would be opposed to it -- are involved in one way or another, and the scope of some of the test cases has been staggering. The problem is, the more that students are allowed to time-shift the educational experience, the more that the market for education could begin to resemble the time-shifted market for entertainment content. Binge-watching lectures will become the new “cram the night before the exam.” Supercuts of class lectures will become the new Cliffs Notes for the online video generation. From this perspective, it’s easy to see how time-shifting the classroom experience will fundamentally change the university experience. The other problem is that time-shifting entertainment may actually lead universities to de-emphasize high-quality content that simply isn’t getting a big enough “live” audience.