Recorded Lectures & AI Tutoring

(A Powerful One-Two Combination for Lifelong Learners)

In an earlier post I shared a discussion I had with the Copilot AI bot about recorded lectures. In this post I’d like to point out that recorded lectures and AI tutoring are powerful individually and even more powerful when combined.

Let me talk about lectures first.

You can get recorded lectures from online vendors, like the Great Courses.

The Great Courses has a selection of hundreds of courses you can purchase and stream. Here are just a few of the courses they offer.

Before there was a company called “The Great Courses,” there was a company called “The Teaching Company,” which, confusingly, sold “Great Courses.” The Teaching Company was an audacious little start-up founded in 1990 by Tom Rollins. You can still find a lot of the courses published by The Teaching Company in libraries and used bookstores and online stores. Many are excellent.

You can also get recorded lectures from other sources. For example, you might be able to get your hands on courses from the old Modern Scholar series, like this one.

The Modern Scholar courses are no longer being put out, but you can still find CDs in public libraries and you can purchase mp3 recordings online through Audible.com.

You can also download mp3 lectures from university websites, like Open Yale Courses. The screenshot below shows the main page for Donald Kagan’s lectures on Ancient Greek History, available online through Open Yale Courses.

Wherever you get your lectures from, however, there’s a problem you are certain to face — that is, what do you do when the lecture ends?

Did you listen to the lecture while driving to work? What are the chances your co-workers will be keen to talk about the historical Jesus? And what are the chances your boss will be keen to have a bunch of you do so while you’re on the clock?

Did you listen to the lecture while driving home from work? What are the chances your spouse will want to talk about debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists over dinner?

Recorded lectures often come with a little booklet or pdf. If you are looking for a little something extra after listening to the lectures, you can read the booklet. It can be a useful supplement. It will probably point you to some books you can read.

What no vendor can supply, however, is a person who can field any questions you might have. The professor who gives the lectures is not physically present, and the recordings don’t come with a teaching assistant either.

This is where AI can step in — because a good AI bot, like Copilot, can serve as a first-class tutor.

An AI bot is not a real person, of course, and it can’t listen to the lectures in the same way you do. However, it may have ingested the printed course guide that comes with the lectures, as well as comments and reviews from the TTC website. More importantly, it has probably ingested various books and articles by the lecturer and scores of books and articles by other scholars who have written on the subject. In other words, it’s likely to have acquired (in its own peculiar way) a staggering amount of knowledge. This is part of what makes it useful as a surrogate T.A.

But knowledge is actually only half of the story. The other half is . . . patience. These bots display superhuman patience — or if you prefer, they display nonhuman patience.

If you ask a human T.A. a long string of questions, eventually he or she will say, “Listen, it’s great that you have so many questions, but I have to go back to my apartment, cook some Ramen noodles, and work on my dissertation.”

The bots never say that. They never get tired of answering questions, and they have no use for Ramen noodles.

So, lifelong learners, here is a powerful learning cocktail you can prepare for yourselves, without breaking the bank or moving to New Haven, Connecticut.

1. Find some recorded lectures that interest you and listen to them.
2. Once you’ve listened to some or all of the lectures, add several jiggers of Copilot AI (or another good bot), to taste.

This is a fantastic combination — like rum and coke in the beverage world, or chocolate and peanut butter in the candy world.

Please note: I’m not saying that humans are unnecessary or that I prefer recorded lectures and chatbots to real people. I’m sure you could get better instruction at top universities. But we don’t all live near top universities, and we can’t all afford top universities. And not all universities are top universities. And even at top universities, there are disappointing professors and disappointing T.A.s.

If we compare the classic professor plus T.A. combination with the new recorded lectures plus bot combination, we can see that the latter has some real advantages. Even the world’s greatest professor won’t go back and repeat the last twenty minutes of a lecture because you didn’t get it the first time, and even the world’s most devoted T.A. will tap out and go home for Ramen noodles eventually. Also, it’s not easy to find lecturers willing to lecture in your car while you drive across the United States — and I don’t know any T.A.s who will answer the phone and field follow-up questions during the peak insomnia hours of 2:00 and 3:00 o’clock in the morning.

The two members of the new team also complement one another nicely. The professor has recorded his best take and the subject and probably can’t afford to give you much more time. He — or she — has books and articles to write. But if you have access to a bot, it will give you all the time you need. It is elastic in precisely the area where most professors cannot afford to be elastic.

The Teaching Company used to have have a marketing slogan that spoke to me:

Imagine how much you could learn if you could spend just a few hours a week in the best lecture classes in the land!

This can now be updated to fit the new situation:

Imagine how much you could learn if you could spend just a few hours a week in the best lecture classes in the land — and a few additional hours conversing with a T.A. that never gets sick of answering your questions!