11/06/2025
When I first stepped into university, the calendars showed the beginning of the 21st century. Everything in universities was slower, more physical, more class-oriented. Information was sacred, access to information was difficult. Classrooms were the temple of information, and professors were the carriers of truth. There were no smartphones or tablets, laptops were a luxury for students, and carrying a laptop, if you had one, was another problem. The professor would draw a diagram on the board, and in a world where you couldn’t take out your phone and take a photo of the board, there was no other choice but to take notes because that drawing was neither in the library nor on Google.
Therefore, students had to go to class to access information. It was difficult to understand what the professor was saying without hearing it, without being in that environment. The lesson was unique, like the professor’s voice. In fact, most of the time, even a friend’s notes were not enough to help. Information was alive, bound to space and limited to time. Therefore, coming to class was not a choice, it was a necessity.
We are now in a period where artificial intelligence tools are directly involved in daily education, where we question the place of information rather than access to it. We should admit that the questions of students who come to class asking, “What is here that ChatGPT cannot give me?” are quite legitimate. Do students have to go to class to learn course content today? To be honest, I don’t know. But I have some answers to this question, although I am not sure of their accuracy, but I am convinced about them.
Here, I think the question needs to be reformulated first. Can they find the content I teach in class in a complete, contextual, interpreted, and pedagogically filtered form from a scattered internet sea? It is easy to access information, but I think it is still difficult to establish meaning. Indeed, finding information is not enough, you need to know what to associate with what, in what context to analyze. Courses are areas that establish this context, transforming information from “memorization” to “meaning”. If all you need is information, then yes, Wikipedia or ChatGPT are more than enough. But constructing meaning, guiding thought, and providing a framework remain the tasks of the course and the professor.
At this point, another very reasonable question can be raised. So why do we invite students to the class instead of recording lessons and sharing them with students? If we take this question a step further, we need to accept that when we record lessons as videos today, we produce not only a narrative but also a data set. These video contents are not only watched again by students, they also become open to analysis by artificial intelligence systems. My diction, my example selection, the time I allocate to topics, questions, and answers, all of these become data that can be analyzed. This means that what is explained in the lesson becomes not only a pedagogical object but also a digitally reproducible object.
So why don't I record a video of the lesson and share it, but I re-teach it every semester? Because I don't see teaching a lesson as just "transferring information." Narration is shaped by the rhythm of the moment, the reaction of the class, and the student's current state. The same joke works one day, and the class remains silent the next. The same example may attract the student's attention one year, but lose meaning the following year. The value of live narration lies not in the content but in the context, relationship, and interaction.
Therefore, the video of the lesson can be watched, but the classroom is lived. This difference is, in my opinion, the only pedagogical area that the digital age has not yet been able to fully replace. Therefore, I am in favor of seeing the lesson as a relationship that can be “established” and not just “recorded.” And this relationship should be reestablished and breathed anew each semester.
Or maybe this article is just the ravings of an academic trying to produce romantic justifications for an outdated educational process. I don’t know. Time will tell.
