Parker Adey | Video Recording Lectures

At UTSC we have a program for automatically video recording lectures. I think that this is an incredible feature¹. I wish that I had had access to video recordings when I was a student. However, I think that it’s helpful to consider the best use of recordings and their possible short comings.

What’s the best possible way to study if a course is being recorded? Attend lecture, but don’t take notes. Just engage with the lecture, ask lots of questions, and be really present. If a lecture is being recorded, then writing is a distraction. You can go back and watch anything that you missed later.

Isn’t this a huge waste of time? Yes. It is. However, it is also a well established fact that spacing out repetition helps learning. If you re-watch a lecture that you attended, you’re studying twice. And that’s a good thing!

Seriously engaging with lecture, and avoiding writing, helps. The main themes of a mathematics lecture get repeated over and over. If you’re copying everything down verbatim, then you might not have enough mental energy to notice the themes develop. Engaging fully in lecture and asking lots of questions, even if you only ask them silently to yourself, is very helpful.

Here’s my advice: if a course is being recorded then attend lecture, don’t take notes, engage fully, and use the recordings as a way to study later².

One last upside of video recordings: You can pause, rewind, and rewatch. You can also speed up or slow down the lecture. These are incredible superowers. There is no way to do any of this in a live lecture. With a video recording, you can re-experience the lesson as many times as you want. This is amazing for maximizing the effect of spacing out repetition. This ability to re-experience material is why I record my lectures.

What are the downsides of recordings? Sometimes, they don’t work. I’ve had videographers forget to show up to work, forget to turn on the camera, mysteriously lose the video file, and worse. You never know what will happen. How often does something go wrong? If I had to make an estimate, I would say that the lecture recording process fails at least once per course. What happens to those missing lectures?

This means that if a lecture is missed, it will not be replaced. I might be able to link to a recording from an older iteration of the course, but I might not able to. Even if I am able to link to a previous recording, it will be from a different version of a course. And every time a course runs, it runs slightly differently.

If watching video recordings of a class is the only way that you attend lecture, then there is a chance that you will miss several lectures due to technical errors. According to my estimate, you will miss one lecture per course, but that’s nothing terrible. Ask a friend for the notes and talk about them together. It will be a good time.

Beyond the possibility of missing a video recording, I think that there is a deeper reason to attend lecture. If you attend lecture, then you can engage with the class. You can ask questions. You can chat with your neighbours. You can make friends. All these things contribute to well-being. Staying at home and watching six hours of automated recordings of calculus lectures the night before the midterm does not contribute to your well-being.

Taking A Recorded Class #

During the summer semester of 2026, I took a thirty hour long online class. It consisted of lots of short videos and seemingly endless text-to-speech slideshows. As the course played in the background, I did everything except pay attention to it. I folded laundry, juggled, danced, tidied the house, wrote e-mails, worked on my website, and so on. Anything to make the time pass while the course played.

I really wanted to learn the material but I really did not want to watch the videos. The videos were terrible, the slides were dumb, and the whole experience sucked.

I didn’t take any notes. I completely gave in to slacking. Whenever a quiz popped up, I would guess the answer if it wasn’t worth marks. If it was worth marks, I would select my answer and immediately run the question through ChatGPT. Sometimes I was right, but often I was wrong and had to update my answer.

And, to be frank, I think that this is the most natural way to interact with an online video-based course. Watching a video of boring material is boring, so you naturally want to do more interesting things. If you’re all alone, with no community around you, why not slack off?

And this experience has made me doubt whether anyone would ever use videos in the way that I suggested above. If you do sit down with a video, take notes, pause, and repeat things, please let me know². I am eager to chat with students who use videos in this way.

This little note about my own experience of taking a recorded note is here just to say that I think most people will slack off if they rely on videos. It seems that slacking off and distracting yourself as much as possible is the natural response, at least my natural response, to watching recordings. Your experience may be entirely different.

Acknowledgments #

Cheryl Lepard pointed out that students could also record the time during lecture for referencing the video recording. If something interesting comes up at 22min of the lecture, write that in the margin, and you can look it up later using the video.

I’ve thought that recording lectures is a great idea for a long time. Back when I was at UTM, I even bought a GoPro and started filming lectures myself. Here is a rather cringe video from 2018. ↩︎
If you study like this already, or try it out as a way of studying, please contact me. I want to hear from you. ↩︎ ↩︎

Video Recording Lectures

Taking A Recorded Class #

Acknowledgments #

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