Why the bank never gets watched
Forty lectures is fifty hours. At 2x it's twenty-five, which sounds tractable and is not, because you cannot passively absorb twenty-five hours of dense material in a fortnight while also doing everything else. And passive is the operative word — watching is the most passive activity available, and speeding it up does not make it active. It makes it faster and worse.
What recordings are actually good for
- Re-watching the four minutes you didn't follow. Precise, targeted, enormously valuable. This is the killer feature and almost nobody uses it, because they didn't attend and so don't know which four minutes.
- Catching up on a lecture you genuinely missed — illness, a clash, a placement.
- Getting the exact wording of a definition the lecturer stressed.
- Turning the recording into questions. Transcribe it, then quiz yourself — that converts a passive artefact into retrieval practice, which is the only version of this that produces learning.
Attend anyway. Yes, really
The live lecture has properties the recording doesn't: you can ask a question, you are forced to pay attention for a fixed hour, and — mundane but decisive — it actually happens, at a specific time, whereas the recording is always available and therefore always deferrable. "I'll watch it later" is a sentence with a very poor track record.