Academics and TV executives have a lot in common. Their job is to gather together an audience in one place – whether it is the lecture hall or sofa in the den – and begin to instruct, inform and of course, entertain them, while hoping to hold their attention for at least an hour.

It’s a doomed model.

Teens and twenty-somethings no longer watch primetime TV. They prefer YouTube, DVDs and the Xbox. Moreover, students can barely stay awake through their first-period economics course. (Too much YouTube, DVD and Xbox).

Sagely, TV executives have figured out that it’s best to let individual audience members determine the appropriate time, place and medium to get their daily dose of entertainment/information/instruction. They even have a Hollywood-sounding name for it: "time shifting". When it comes to the fickle 18-24 demographic, in particular, forget about reaching them on the old tube. Put it online for them to download, goes the thinking now.

And what has been the academic world’s answer to the concept of time-shifting? Anyone, anyone? Right. Surprisingly little.

In an age where we can view Lost and Desperate Housewives on iTunes a few hours after airing on the tube, why can’t university students get this morning’s Chemistry 101 lecture off the net?

It’s not a matter of lacking the technological know-how holding back the prospect. Nearly every university has the bandwidth and IT support staff to convert a classroom lecture into a podcast. (If they do not, one of the first-year students could do it for them – with or without receiving extra credit).

It also doesn’t appear to be a matter of keeping university activities confined behind closed doors. Over the past few years, many universities have been putting support materials online – in the form of syllabi and even class notes – on the university website for outsiders to see. Plus, a growing number of top universities have allowed general online access to celebrity guest lectures such as Hans Blix’s discussion of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction at Tufts University last year.

Such measures are great PR and branding opportunities, but they’re not going to do much for struggling students. It should be noted that some pioneering schools such as Stanford University, the University of Washington and MIT offer many class lectures later for download, but the vast majority of universities still do not.

The primary reason for not wiring up the lecture hall is the fear it will upset the traditional classroom dynamic. Podcasts will become a study aid for the truant student, goes the thinking, and if the podcasts catch on, students will skip class en masse and the entire learning experience will be thrown into turmoil.

The conundrum has kicked up a long overdue debate on classroom time-shifting. On the Slashdot discussion board this week, a person identified as working for "a major US university" fired the latest salvo, summing up an increasingly common dilemma in the halls of academia these days: do we or don’t we podcast?

"I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam," the Slashdot poster wrote.

The good news for students is the traditionalists in academia will no doubt lose this battle. More and more classroom materials and lectures – certainly taped, but quite possibly live too – will be posted online.

"Good teaching is interactive," says Sally Feldman, the Dean of Westminster University’s School for Media, Arts and Design and chair of the university’s web group. "And you can do that online quite well. We have to be a little bit less precious about the learning experience. There are some kinds of information that students just want to get again and again."

One of the reasons the podcast will become as essential as the pen and paper is because of the growing need for accountability in the classroom, she adds: "It is about time that we started being more concerned about performance in education."

If it means the end of first-period classes, I for one am in favour.

Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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