Are you better off skipping class?

Podcasts really don't work well for some classes, but in the case of other sorts of classes - e.g. History - podcasting is actually a pretty good alternative to showing up to class. Of course, as the intro that I've excerpted below notes, it's really about how you make use of stuff like that.

Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.

Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.

From: New Scientist