#16: Lecture videos

The lecture video is definitely the greatest thing to happen to lectures in the last 1,000 years. Before, medical students would need to be physically present at lectures in order to get the information needed for any given class. Lectures would commonly start at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m., but more immoral lecturers would start class even earlier than that. Tens to twenties of med students suffered under this system, but thankfully, lecture videos have changed this entire dynamic. Now, having lectures recorded allows the students to decide exactly how late in the day they want to start watching lectures, to rewind the lecture and review pertinent information immediately, and to turn off the lecture as soon as they get sick of listening to lecturers babble on about nothingness. Basically, it takes control away from the lecturers and puts it into the hands of the medical students, and lets them schedule their lecture-watching around more important things like eating and watching baseball.

One of the best things about lecture videos is that you can skip right past any nonsense that might happen in class, something that the poor suckers who actually attend won't be able to do. For example, if a fire alarm goes off (surprisingly common) or if a lecturer goes into a story that has nothing to do with the subject at hand (unsurprisingly common), you can fast-forward right past it. It's really too bad that life doesn't come with this kind of functionality, because your time is too precious for that kind of garbage.

However, the greatest benefit by far that lecture videos have over actually attending lecture is the ability to use add-ons like 2xAV to watch the videos at faster than normal speeds without chipmunk voices, as if all the benefits noted above already weren't enough. 2xAV allows users to watch RealPlayer videos at up to 2.5 times normal speed, which means that a 50 minute lecture can be watched in 20 minutes. While you might be afraid that you won't be retaining all the information when you watch it this quickly, just know that everyone else in your class is watching it at this speed. Remember that it's more important to fit in with your peers than to learn things properly.

Really the only improvement that needs to be made is to expand lecture videos to all parts of the medical school curriculum. Anatomy, for example, would be a much more pleasant experience if you didn't have to actually ever be in a dank, malodorous anatomy lab. Even events like Orientation or Commencement could benefit from being fast-forwarded through - or skipped altogether! Unfortunately, medical school administrations will never let this happen, but it's nice to dream of what could have been.