<h3>Some university teachers prefer to record their lectures before classes. In this way, students will be familiar with the lecture in advance and teachers help students practice in classes while they are watching or listening to lectures.</h3>
College teachers are seeking for efficient ways to teach college students who are considered independent and intelligent. Someone proposes a novel teaching model that college teachers ask students to watch or listen to a recorded lecture before class and do practices about what they have learned in class. Generally speaking, I think it is a good idea for three reasons.

Firstly, students are able to spend enough time learning and digesting the knowledge before class, whereas it is hard to comprehend completely what the professor has talked of in a 45-minute class. To be more specific, students before class can spend at least a whole night preparing the lesson tomorrow, watching the recorded lectures, browsing through the textbook, consulting reference books, or discussing with classmates, which are helpful approaches to enhance their knowledge. After finishing these, students will not have the fear of getting confused in class. Moreover, some excellent students are able to make use of the provided course resources to think about some hard problems and put their questions forward in class, which is good for exploiting their study potential. To illustrate, I could imagine how upset my sister Gina was when she told me that she always felt difficult to keep up with the pace of the professor’s speech. Due to a lot of elusive concepts taught in class, she became frustrated and consequently fell behind in the final exam. What if the teacher provided my sister recorded lecture before class? In this way, my sister could clear up her confusion and gain the knowledge by watching the course videos several times.

Secondly, in addition to the students’ better understanding, teachers can benefit from saving time and energy on teaching the knowledge in class. Given the same course, the teachers teach very similar knowledge every semester for different classes. Elucidating the concepts again and again is an arduous work. By way of example, I can recall my math teacher Ms. Lee who felt tired and uncomfortable after teaching 3 classes, or around 5 hours within a day but she still had another course later. This in turn had inverse effects on the result of teaching. However, if there are recorded lectures, the teachers do not need to spend much energy on speaking in class. Instead, the students take the exam in class concerning what they have learned before class. The teachers merely answer the students’ questions from self-learning process and tests, or highlight some arcane ideas, which is much easier for teachers.

Finally, studying in front of the screen alone, without timely communication with teachers, does not necessarily mean that college students cannot study with efficiency. I will be the first to admit that there are students out there who have developed long-term learning habits of listening to the lecture in class; it’s instinctive in many of them to continue to study more effectively during in class rather than before class. Despite this possibility, under the new model of teaching in college, I gradually became less dependent on teachers than I did in high school and learned how to solve problems by searching relevant resources and solutions on the Internet. I think this is the case for many other college students as well, so I do not think it is necessarily fair to claim that, just because the students do not interact with teachers, then they cannot study efficiently by watching the recorded lecture. In fact, I believe learning by recorded courses is a good start to handle the transition to self-learning in college.

By the way of conclusion, based on the arguments explored above, I am of the opinion that in most cases college teachers should adopt the new teaching method, recording the lecture in advance and letting the students watch it before class, which is better for all concerned, both the students and the teachers.